Michael Hochgeschwender, “Evangelikalismus und wokeness: Zur gesellschaftlichen Funktion der Semantik des Erwachens” / “Evangelicalism and Wokeness: On the Social Function of the Semantics of Awakening”
Thursday, 8 February 2024, 19:15 CET
Auditorium of the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum
Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 1-3
10117 Berlin
GERMANY
With Ethel Matala de Mazza
Sponsored by:
The Mosse Foundation
Institut für deutsche Literatur
Humboldt University
Mosse Lectures
Lecture Overview: Modern religious revival movements and postmodern wokeness are extremely vague terms, as they are usually ascribed to others or at least to themselves, which were then reinterpreted in social discourse. This alone makes it difficult to precisely determine content and goals. Above all, however, they refer to very different degrees of wakefulness, regardless of how exactly they are understood. While religious revival movements focus on a process of awakening, wokeness requires vigilance. Nevertheless, the reverse is also true: religious revival demands vigilance, wokeness a form of awakening, whereby both find a negative point of reference in »sleep«. Using examples from the USA, the lecture explores the question of what is understood by »sleep«, »awakening« and »vigilance« and what social and political consequences this understanding entails.
Michael Hochgeschwender: Cultural historian, professor of North American cultural history, empirical cultural research, and cultural anthropology at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich; his research interests are primarily the history of the U.S. in the antebellum and Civil War eras and in the period since World War II, the history of women and gender in the U.S., the history of U.S. Catholicism, Westernization, and the cultural history of the Cold War; Hochgeschwender is on the advisory board of the German Society for American Studies and the author of numerous books on the history of religion and culture in the United States.
Photo credit: Niels Leiser for the Mosse Lectures