Just out now: “From Nation States to Communities of Interest: Solidarity and Human Rights Declarations in Wolfgang Fischer`s Styx,” written by Isabell Sluka (PhD candidate in German Studies). The article is published in a special issue of Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. VII, Issue 1 (January 2022).

According to the author, the article

examines how human rights and rightlessness in particular are negotiated in Wolfgang Fischer’s film Styx (2018), the story of one German woman’s tragic maritime encounter with a group of African refugees fleeing to Europe. Drawing primarily upon Hannah Arendt’s (1951, 1958, 1963, 1968) and Seyla Benhabib’s (2004) political thoughts as well as the “political practices of founding human rights” that Ayten Gündoğdu (2015) proposes in her reading of Arendt, I argue that the film engages with human rights critically and calls attention to grievances but also offers an alternative conception of what political action may look like in practice.

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