Einleitung

Außenseiterdiskurse zwischen den Zeiten, Kulturen und Medien

Abstract

Outsiders – individuals or small groups accused of violating the rules by influential social elites or large groups and therefore excluded from them – seem to be omnipresent in modern western societies that nowadays are increasingly shaped by political, religious, and social crises. The protectionist nationalism, resurgent in many countries and accompanied by violence between religious and/or ethnic groups, but also the looming backlash against emancipatory movements and egalitarian changes within a society are just some of the current symptoms of this boom of outsiders. Unquestionably, there have always been outsiders in both older and more recent history: The early modern witch hunt with a clearly misogynistic orientation, the ethnically motivated expulsion of the Native Americans as well as the Holocaust in the Nazi era – all these waves of persecution can be characterized as ideologically motivated campaigns of established groups against stigmatized and rigorously marginalized minorities: In all manifestations, power structures are at work that have left their traces in the diverse and competing discourses of outsiders and about outsiders, to which this dossier is dedicated.