Kommentiertes Vorlesungsverzeichnis Anglistik Heidelberg SS 2008

4 PROSEMINARE
4.9 Proseminar II Kulturwissenschaft/Landeskunde
Lehramts- und Magisterstudierende können in allen Veranstaltungen dieses Typs einen
Landeskundeschein erwerben.
Bachelor-Modul Studiengang/Semester
Intermediate Studies Culture 25% KW 4.-5. Semester
Intermediate Seminar Linguistics and Culture 50% Wahlpflichtmodul 4.-6. Semester
Intermed. Sem. Linguistics, Literature & Culture 75% 3.-5. Semester
Intermediate Studies Linguistics and Culture 75% Wahlpflichtmodul 4.-6. Semester
6 Leistungspunkte
Of Rape, Travellers, and Virtuous Heroes: Three Satires of the Golden Age
Stefanie Schäfer Dienstag 14:15 – 15:45 110 2st.
Description see page 28.
“I Do Mind Dying” – Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers
(LRBW)
Dr. Schiffmann Montag 11:15 – 12:45 113 2st.
“Please, Mr. Foreman, slow down your assembly line / Please Mr. Forman, slow down your
assembly line / No, I don’t mind workin’, but I do mind dyin’. Thus went a popular urban blues
song in “Motor City,” the bastion of the American automobile industry Detroit. At the time, a
peculiar factor about Detroit was that a substantial proportion of its automobile workers were black.
In the 1960s, when this song was written, the U.S. car companies boasted that their capacity in the
face of international competition to still increase output and sales was due to managerial skill and
new technology.
Many workers, however, attributed it to their being forced harder and faster under increasingly bad
and dangerous conditions. Black workers in Detroit in particular refused to call the process going on
“automation,” calling it “niggermation” instead: The competitiveness of much of Detroit’s auto
industry was based on the super-exploitation of black workers.
Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, General Motors – they all profited while the laborers indeed often crossed
the thin line from working to dying, in one of the extraordinary frequent work accidents that either
permanently disabled or killed a shocking number of workers. From this situation sprang what
social theorist Fredric Jameson has called “the single most significant political experience of the
1960s,” which of course themselves were one of the most turbulent decade in post-War history.
There were Revolutionary Union Movements (RUM) named after firms such as Dodge (DRUM),
Ford (FRUM) and Eldon (ELDRUM), locations such as Jefferson Avenue (JARUM) or professions
such as health (HRUM), and they spread all over the city, later on informally guided by an
organization called League of Black Revolutionary Workers. For a short couple of years, the dream
of black empowerment and workers power seemed – and in part actually was – more than an
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