Medialities

Cultural, social and economic production is always medially constituted, since it is formed through processing, storage and transmission of certain data or materials. This is why the concept of mediality can be used to stress the performative character of all culture, whose multiplicity of techniques conversely interacts with the mediality in question. The contributors focus on a given cultural medium’s genuine structure as a particular deployment without falling into some kind of hardware determinism, therefore considering culture beyond textuality and answering questions like: How can medialities be theorized in order to fortify or alter meanings, genres and agencies in different academic disciplines?

Ute Fendler holds the Chair of Romance Cultural and Comparative Studies at the University of Bayreuth.
Patrice Mwepu is the Director of the Confucius Institute at Rhodes University, South Africa.
Ivo Ritzer holds the Chair of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Bayreuth.