Prototype products for climate change adaption in German coastal regions

<p>The “German Strategy for Adaption to Climate Change” (DAS) is the political framework to climate change adaption in Germany. The newly established DAS basic service “Climate and Water” will provide monitoring and projection data to evaluate requirements for climate change adaption. Various products covering the German water bodies (coastal and inland) and its response to climate change will be generated and frequently updated by a cooperation of four German federal agencies. The products will be tailored to a variety of stakeholders needs.</p><p>Within this framework, the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) will provide products based on an ensemble of climate projections for the German coast which will be created in cooperation with different research institutes and authorities, e.g. the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI).</p><p>Data from a DMI climate projection run based on the HIROMB-BOOS model (HBM) with a meteorological forcing from DMI-HIRHAM5 (one of the RCMs in EURO-CORDEX ensemble) and for the RCP 8.5 scenarios has been analysed in view of different oceanographic parameters such as sea level, sea surface temperature, salinity, currents and ice. This data set includes the historical periods 1981-2010 and the RCP 8.5 periods 2041-2070 and 2071-2100. Therefore, it provides an expedient basis to develop prototype products regarding climate change adaption at the German coasts for customers of the DAS basic service “Climate and Water”. The initial prototype products are presented and discussed in regards to the sufficiency to evaluate requirements for climate change adaption.</p>

Excavating Occluded Histories at Destrehan Plantation: Afro-Creole Resistance from “Marguerite” to Beyoncé

This article interrogates the Creole plantation as a site and sight of memory. It presents a unique case study of Destrehan Plantation, a Creole plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, which, it argues, represents a crypt replete with occluded Afro-Creole histories. These histories speak not only to experiences of subjection and depredation, however, but to rebellious countercultures (represented by syncretic cultural practices), and to acts of collective insurgency (borne out, most potently, in the 1811 German Coast slave uprising). In its analytic enquiry, it engages in a process of what Derek Alderman and Rachel Campbell call “symbolic excavation” in order to penetrate the silences of the Creole plantation, and rehabilitate occluded unruly Afro-Creole voices. It nevertheless strives to go further by promoting interdisciplinary solutions for what it calls “affective memorialization” through what memory studies scholar Karen Till calls “artistic and activist memory-work.” It looks to the work of Hahnsville folk artist Lorraine Gendron and to Beyoncé Knowles Carter's 2016 visual album Lemonade as exemplars of such praxis. In so doing, it invites conversations about how slaveholding histories might be affectively reimagined, and how Afro-Creole histories can be made to service the needs of their descendants.

Radical View of Freedom: An Interview with Dread Scott

In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, just outside the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. It will be a re-performance of the German Coast uprising of 1811, one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in US history. It is the most recent installment in a slowly growing historical body of knowledge about this little-known history. The story is about a radical idea of freedom that Scott seeks to enliven through recruiting the performers. The potential for organizing and future networks is at the heart of this effort. This text is based upon Joey Orr's interview with Dread Scott on Thursday 12 May 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

The Riddle of the Sands

The aesthetic appeal of coasts is due in part to the indeterminacy of the intertidal zone. The imagination finds room to play where land and sea meet. This chapter explores the coastal zone that lies at the heart of a novel considered by many to be the first modern spy thriller, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service. Childers develops the notion of coastal indeterminacy as a figure for the boundaries, ambitions, and limitations of the modern nation-state. The journey of Childers’s characters through a north Atlantic archipelago that extends from the German coast draws a line of association between Europe and Britain, whose form depends on coastlines, estuaries, and shallows. In following this course, Childers creates a narrative fiction that shifts between charts, borders, and languages.