About the Journal
Container 24.51 is a modular office unit which houses parts of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). Built as a temporary structure to expand and partly replace HHU’s dilapidated brutalist buildings from the 1960s, these modular containers have, for now, become a permanent solution and as such can stand for a moment of both crisis and transition in the humanities. They are also home to the section of Transcultural Studies, where transdisciplinary approaches are being tested and developed. This is where Container 24.51 emerges as a publication concept, seizing the opportunities that come along with such a constellation. The paradigm of the container, embraced here as a metaphorical concept, is of course to be understood with a grain of salt: We do of course not want to reproduce the notion of essentialist cultural units which may be associated with it at first glance. Rather, we understand it as a means to merge the categories of space, time, movement and exchange. In this perspective, the modular container may be one of the most underestimated vessels of modern and contemporary culture and history, almost a mythological unit in the Barthesian sense. It is not only related to housing, (academic) infrastructure and crisis-response, but also to the global flow of goods (“Almost everything we own once was in a container”, as journalist Alexis Madrigal said in his podcast on the global container shipping industry), to questions of sustainability, mobility and immobility, and our understanding of size, scale and time. How much can fit into a container, and how fast can it move?
Taking its cue from these very basic questions which are also questions of transcultural studies in the humanities, we envisage Container 24.51 as a loose publication series to house results from the faculty’s own interdisciplinary activities and to host external contributions related to research on transculturality, with a particular focus on the social sciences and humanities. Using the Open Access resources available at the University and State Library Düsseldorf, Container 24.51 wants to offer a technically low-threshold framework with a peer-reviewed editorial process.
Contact: container@hhu.de
Current Issue
The first issue of Container 24.51 builds on a series of productive exchanges and discussions held at the 2024 Summer School T(r)anzkultur: Choreographing Diaspora in a Transnational Landscape, which brought together scholars, dancers, curators, and students to explore critical questions surrounding the study and practice of Asian diaspora dances in Europe and the U.S. Within this framework, the issue features articles and talks discussing the roles of artists, curators, and institutions.
Editors of this issue: Yongli Li and Mbingo K. Itondo
Editorial collaboration: Isabel Hufschmidt, Hannah Noelle-Wying, Miriam Akli
Copy editing: Oliver Walker
