The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Fleeting Moments in Global Berlin

This article examines Berlin’s ascendance to the status of a global city and in particular the tethering of this discourse to the city’s attraction for institutions of world literature. Drawing on fieldwork between 2011 and 2017, it offers a new, critical vantage on the multiple trajectories that mi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Current anthropology 2020-08, Vol.61 (4), p.514-543
Main Author: Brandel, Andrew
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Everyday life
Gentrification
Migrants
Prosody
Social networks
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:This article examines Berlin’s ascendance to the status of a global city and in particular the tethering of this discourse to the city’s attraction for institutions of world literature. Drawing on fieldwork between 2011 and 2017, it offers a new, critical vantage on the multiple trajectories that migrants follow into and through Berlin, as well as how these paths collide. Training ethnographic attention on one important site in which these crossings occur—a literary workshop in a gentrified borough of the former East—reveals long-standing assumptions about the social lives of texts and urban relationships, in which ephemeral forms are understood to be degraded or weak. Mobilizing instead a poetic language of prosody allows us to see how different kinds of circulations are stitched together in the making of everyday life.
ISSN:0011-3204
1537-5382
DOI:10.1086/710138