Strategies and Tendencies of Lower Sorbian Narrative World Making in the 21st Century (working title)

The project investigates Lower Sorbian forms of artistic expression and medial representation (literature, film, art, theater, music, journalism etc.) of the last decades with a focus on characteristic narrative and discursive patterns. The goal is to identify predominant forms of identity construction and self-representation, ideological tendencies, juxtapositions of the self and the Other, as well as meaning-making in a broader sense. By means of a historicizing approach and methodological impulses from literary, cultural, and media studies (spatial theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.), the project aims to explore and analyze essential features and patterns of narrative world-making and reality construction in the Lower Sorbian discursive field of the present and most recent past.

Since Sorbian narrative media often displays a strong connection to the (Sorbian) region of Lusatia, theoretical approaches that are focused on space seem especially applicable as they facilitate the uncovering of the significance of borders and border demarcation, spatially coded power hierarchies, as well as movement and mobility as central challenges for collective identities and conceptions of normality. These spatially construed patterns of meaning, however, cannot be analyzed separately from their temporal dimension, as Lower Sorbian storytelling shows a strong tendency to narratively summon up the past and/or create projections of the future. Further notable dimensions of the narratively constructed realities that this project investigates include the rural-urban divide as a discursive space of negotiation and conflict regarding notions of identity and belonging, human-nature relations as aspects of Lower Sorbian strategies of self-description, references to folktales and myths that are intertwined with identity narratives and ways of interpreting history, as well as gender relations as often contested facets of the overarching fabric that constitutes power relations and notions of order and normality in Lower Sorbian imagined realities.