Bücher von Lena Dassonville

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Cultural Studies - Basics and Definitions, grade: A, , course: Seminar III, language: English, abstract: Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silväs theory of compositional thinking and Kapil Kapoor¿s "Decolonizing the Indian Mind", I wish to briefly interrogate the relationship between consciousness and space, and more specifically, probe the connections between identity and geography in the context of colonialism. Further, building on the work of Jacques Derrida and Katherine McKittrick, I aim to address some of the failings of contemporary critical and (post)colonial theory in regards to how modern leftist, linear theories of the colonial subject persist as detrimental, hauntological renderings. Next, influenced by McKittrick¿s "Mathematics Black Life", I intend to deploy a decolonial interpretation that actively revokes and opposes imaginings of anti-indigenous violence rather than sustains it. I train my sights on the anti-colonial work of Kapoor to identify and dwell on instances and spaces of indigenous freedom and resistance. Ultimately, taking into account Kapoor¿s criticisms of the Western economy and by putting Kapoor¿s and Karl Marx¿s work into conversation with each other, I will analyze how Marxist thought situates itself within a linear context and is unable to extricate itself from the colonial matrix.

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Gender Studies, grade: A, , course: Seminar II, language: English, abstract: I wish to suture Frankenstein with a dialogue bound up with theories of trauma. It is my aim to probe the linkages of trauma inflicted upon female bodies and how these traumatic bodies are not simply rendered passive recipients, but rather how the afflicted female body becomes a site of resistance; how agency can be reclaimed through renarritivization and resistance. The spaces and geographies of theoretical female trauma contained in Frankenstein are not merely traumas unique to Shelley¿s novel, but rather signifiers emblematic of and imbricated in our dominant ideological geographies and collective psyche. It is here that I reject both the phallocentric logics of Freud and Lacan and the anti-Oedipal structures of Deleuze and Guattari and instead put forth my own framework of a non-Oedipal, non-phallic apparatus of the Real. The separation from this non-Oedipal/non-structure, the original trauma of the severing of the child from the mother (the biological excision, psychic cleaving of the I and the non-I) is what inaugurates the formation of severalties and subjectivization, the birth of the gender binary, the masculine and the feminine (a sort of traumatic construction in and of itself.)