Symptoms of Modernity

by Bunzl, Matti

• ISBN13: 9780520238428
• ISBN10: 0520238427
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

In the 1990s, Vienna's Jews and queers abandoned their clandestine existence and emerged into the city's public sphere in unprecedented numbers.Symptoms of Modernitytraces this development in the context of Central European history. Jews and homosexuals are signposts of an exclusionary process of nation-building. Cast in their modern roles in the late nineteenth century, they functioned as Others, allowing a national community to imagine itself as a site of ethnic and sexual purity. In Matti Bunzl's incisive historical and cultural analysis, the Holocaust appears as the catastrophic culmination of this violent project, an attempt to eradicate modernity's abject by-products from the body politic. AsSymptoms of Modernityshows, though World War II brought an end to the genocidal persecution, the nation's exclusionary logic persisted, accounting for the ongoing marginalization of Jews and homosexuals. Not until the 1970s did individual Jews and queers begin to challenge the hegemonic subordination--a resistance that, by the 1990s, was joined by the state's attempts to ensure and affirm the continued presence of Jews and queers.Symptoms of Modernitygives an account of this radical cultural reversal, linking it to geopolitical transformations and to the supersession of the European nation-state by a postmodern polity.

Author Biography

Matti Bunzl is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also directs the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Symptoms of Modernity	1	(28)
PART ONE: SUBORDINATION
Myths and Silences	29	(28)
Laws and Closets	57	(32)
PART TWO: RESISTANCE
Street Fairs and Demonstrations	89	(28)
Cafes and Parades	117	(38)
PART THREE: REPRODUCTION
Museums and Monuments	155	(32)
Offices and Balls	187	(26)
Conclusion: Symptoms of Postmodernity	213	(12)
Notes	225	(46)
Bibliography	271	(16)
Index	287