Thursday 11 July 2024, 6-8m, IG 1.314 (Eisenhower room), Campus Westend, Goethe University Frankfurt, and on Zoom

This lecture is part of the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

This event will also be streamed on Zoom. To join on us Zoom, please use the following details:
Meeting ID: 636 5786 0914
Passcode: 326944

With statements by Victoria Herche (Cologne), Geoff Rodoreda (Stuttgart) and Dashiell Moore(Sydney).

This book presents an innovative and imaginative reading of contemporary Australian literature in the context of unprecedented ecological crisis. It focuses on notions of colonisation, farming, mining, bioethics, technology, environmental justice and sovereignty and offers ‘cosmological readings’ of a diverse range of authors—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—as a challenge to the Anthropocene’s decline narrative. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of ecocriticism, environmental humanities, and postcolonial and Indigenous studies, with a primary focus on Australian, New Zealand, Oceanic, and Pacific area studies. 

Reviews

“[This] is an important new work of Australian ecocriticism. Bartha-Mitchell’s readings emphasise interconnections between beings, agencies and systems that work against the traditional humanistic focus of western prose fiction and offer a critical new dimension to Australian literary studies.” 
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia

“An innovative intervention in the environmental humanities, this thought-provoking study of contemporary Australian literature makes a powerful case for the generative concept of cosmos and, more broadly, for the importance of literary studies within the wider field.” 
Diletta De Cristofaro, Assistant Professor, Northumbria University, UK

Bio note

Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of New English Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt. Her areas of focus are transcultural Anglophone Literature, Ecocriticism and Intergenerational Justice. She earned her PhD within the joint programme between Goethe and Monash University in Melbourne.

Thursday 4 July 2024, 4-6pm, IG 1.314 (Eisenhower room), Campus Westend, Goethe University Frankfurt, and on Zoom

This lecture is part of the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

This guest lecture will also take place on Zoom. To join on us Zoom, please use the following details:
Meeting ID: 629 9728 6450
Passcode: 776261

The Mad Max franchise has a tense relationship with the geophysical and atmospheric contingencies of far west New South Wales, Australia. In 2011, Mad Max: Fury Road was set to film in the region, taking advantage of the area’s known vast arid “outback” plains. However, production was suddenly halted due to recent rainfall in the region. The location had become ‘too green’ to conform to the apocalyptic stylings of Mad Max. The film was delayed, and eventually ended up being relocated to Namibia, Africa. While the region not being arid enough to perform its duty as a Mad Max location was widely publicised, what is lesser known is that the region has struggled with producing the apocalyptic aesthetic of the films since the 1980s.

This talk unearths 40 years of Mad Max related histories within this region, including production and industry details of Mad Max 2 (1981), Fury Road (2015), and Furiosa (2024) – all (almost) shot on location in far west NSW. Not considering landscape as merely a setting, I situate on-location filmmaking as an industrial practice, asking how the geophysical spaces of this region in Australia have been critical as ‘co-producers’ in Australia’s film history, alongside humans and political economies. Tracking histories of high rainfall and the related boom of plant growth in this regional arid zone alongside film production, I find that  it remains a common production strategy within the region to physically intervene into the geophysical environment. In this way, I find that the film’s location shapes Mad Max’s aesthetic, but in turn, that film production also shapes the region’s environmental spaces.

Drawing from Australian transnational film histories, environmental humanities, media infrastructures and media industry research, this talk forwards a methodology for thinking about Australia’s film history and contemporary industry as deeply comingled with the environment.

Bio note

Melanie Ashe’s research explores how resource extraction and management has shaped the Australian moving image and its surrounding industry and cultures, focusing on the region around Broken Hill as a case study. Her research is part of the Australian Research Council funded project,‘Remaking the Australian Environment Through Documentary Film and Television’. Previously, she worked in Environmental Communications before completing her Masters in Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.

Thursday 6 June 2024, 6-8pm, Cas 1.801 (Renate von Metzler-Saal), Campus Westend, Goethe University Frankfurt,

This lecture is part of the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

This lecture will explore how the memory of Portuguese presence in Goa has been recollected by authors of Goan heritage representing different generations — e.g. Lambert Mascarenhas’ ‘Sorrowing lies my Land’ (1955), Maria Aurora Couto’s ‘Goa: A Daughter’s Story’ (2004), and Suneeta Peres da Costa’s ‘Saudade’ (2019). I will read these literary texts within the memory work being undertaken in the post-Pandemic moment by a range of entrepreneurs within Goa’s creative economy as well as an increasing body of artists returning to the rich musical legacy of the Portuguese empire. From Nehru’s India, when Goa got absorbed into the Indian Union, to the early years of Hindutva ascendancy, and now to Modi’s India, turning to the history connecting Portugal to India represent conscious acts of memorialisation by these diverse cultural actors. Their literary, embodied, and performed interventions activate memories of transoceanic belonging whose postcolonial significance I draw out through theories of interimperiality, archipelagicity, and creolisation.

Bio note

Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. She researches the intersection of the written text with other forms of cultural expression within acts of collective memorialization and forgetting. She is currently writing ‘Alegropolitics: Connecting on the Afromodern Dance Floor.’ Her new research projects explore further the concepts of transoceanic creolization through cultural production across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. 

Through an ERC Advanced Grant (2013-2018), she led ‘Modern Moves’, an interdisciplinary investigation into African-heritage social dance and music. For her innovative work in the Humanities, she received the Infosys Humanities Prize (2018), awarded by the Infosys Science Foundation, India, and  the Humboldt Forschungspreis (Humboldt Prize, 2018), awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Germany.

Thursday, May 2, 2024, at 6 pm (18:00 s.t.)

Goethe University Frankfurt, Campus Westend, Casino, Room 1.811

The increasing globalization of collective memories has been at the centre of debates within the interdisciplinary field of Memory Studies for more than two decades. In the early 2000s, Daniel Levy’s and Natan Sznaider’s book The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2001) energized discussions that led to the transcultural and transnational turn in Memory Studies. Their concept of “cosmopolitan memory” – based on the insight that memories of the Holocaust were used as a “template” for addressing political violence and genocide worldwide and had brought about new visions global justice – was widely discussed both as a conceptual tool and as a normative idea.

Over the past decade, concerns have been raised about the particular dynamics of cosmopolitan memory in postcolonial contexts. Claims for recognition and reparation of colonial injustices have caught increasing international attention. Political debates about the decolonization of international legal frameworks followed. Such more recent postcolonial and decolonial perspectives invite us to critically rethink the idea of cosmopolitan memory.

The public debates and political violence of the 2020s (the Mbembe-scandal, Documenta 15, the “historians’ debate 2.0,” the war in Ukraine, the Israel-Palestine conflict) brought home the need to rethink conceptualizations of cosmopolitan memory even more strongly. (How) can we adapt them to particular mnemonic contexts? How can we better pay attention to marginalized regions and debates? What happens when memories produced and curated in Europe travel to different regions in the Global South? How do descendants of colonial injustices and activists relate to “other people’s memories,” and how do they seek to mobilize cosmopolitan memory in their struggles for recognition and reparation? For example, what role do cosmopolitan dynamics currently play in debates about the colonial genocide of the OvaHerero and Nama in Namibia and Germany’s responsibility? Or in remembering imperialism and India’s 1947 partition among South Asian communities in the UK? Or how are memories of the Holocaust and Japanese occupation entangled in the Philippines?

Our roundtable opens up a space to discuss and develop new perspectives on such entangled and sometimes contradictory contemporary processes of mnemonic transformation. It brings together international scholars and activists engaging with cosmopolitan memory, post-colonialism and decolonization from a variety of perspectives. 

Guests

Emily Keightley (Professor of Media and Memory Studies, Loughborough University)

Daniel Levy (Professor of Sociology, Stony Brook University)

Jocelyn S. Martin (Associate Professor, Faculté des Humanités, Université Catholique de l’Ouest)

Jephta U. Nguherimo (Writer and Reparation Activist, OvaHereroPeople’s Memorial & Reconstruction Foundation, Washington/Windhoek)

The roundtable will be moderated by

Kaya de Wolff (Ph.D. in Media and Communication Studies, with a thesis on memories of the OvaHerero and Nama genocide in the German press; Researcher in the TraCe Network)

Astrid Erll (Professor of English at Goethe University, founder of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, and co-speaker of TraCe)

To register, please contact Cornelia Argast.

For information about the speakers, visit the event page.

Thursday, 2 May 2024, 3-6pm 
Campus Westend, Casino, Room 1.811

In this talk, Professor Anoma Pieris discusses the design, intellectual framing for and methodological approach to her most recent publication, The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War (Cambridge University Press 2022), co-authored with Japanese-American scholar Lynne Horiuchi. The book takes the arc of the Pacific Basin and incarceration environment heritage and memory as a framework for understanding how settler societies impacted by war negotiated changing attitudes to citizenship. Presenting the Pacific theatre of World War II as a site of imperial border conflict between Britain, its allies and Japan, the research covers memorial sites in North America, Asia and Australia.

To register, please contact the organizers at trace-events(at)prif.org until April 25, 2024.

Find out more on the event page. 

Bi-weekly meetings, starting Tuesday 23 April, 4pm | Room SH 0.109

Dr. Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell and Clara Hebel (M.A.) are running an Environmental Humanities slow reading group on Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology this summer term.

What it is

The format of this group follows the principles of slow, emergent, and collective scholarship. We want to try out a new format: We will (silently) read a section of the text while we are gathered in one room, and then discuss it together.

How to join

This means that no prior preparation is necessary, nor is a registration; if you’re interested just come along! Neimanis’ text is available for free online.

More information: https://qis.server.uni-frankfurt.de/qisserver/rds…

Zoom link: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/3841032435?pwd=g6AXR92aC8GhUqSvBm7KUqwyo-5lKA

Tuesday 14 November, 6pm, SH 2.105 (Seminarhaus, Campus Westend, Max-Horkheimer-Str. 4)

Am 14. November wird Christopher L. Ballengee seine Dokumentation Sweet Tassa: Music of the Indian Caribbean Diaspora über Musik, Politik und Zugehörigkeit in Trinidad und Tobago am Institut für Musikwissenschaft vorführen. Der Regisseur und Musikethnologe wird eine Einführung geben und nach dem Film für Diskussion und Fragen zur Verfügung stehen.

About the film

Brought to Trinidad by indentured laborers from India who first arrived in 1845, tassa drumming has become an important marker of Indian Trinidadian cultural identity. The film explores both musical and political elements of tassa performance, focusing on the life and family of noted drummer Lenny Kumar. As the story unfolds, tassa emerges as a metaphor for Indian Caribbean culture, rooted in India while also thoroughly Caribbean.

About Christopher L. Ballengee

Christopher L. Ballengee is an ethnomusicologist and Associate Professor of Music at Anne Arundel Community College (Maryland, USA). He has researched Indian music in Trinidad and the Caribbean community in Florida since 2007. He was the inaugural Diego Carpitella Visual Ethnomusicology fellow at the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies (Venice, Italy) in 2018-2019, which supported the production of Sweet Tassa: Music of the Indian Caribbean Diaspora.

Thursday 9 November, 6pm, SH 3.107

Original Portuguese Version with English Subtitles

Terra Estrangeira: Cinematographic Constructions of Lisbon from the Perspective of
Migration
During Bolsonaro’s presidency (2019-22), many Brazilians migrated to Europe. This heavy
migration movement was preceded by the one in 1990 (Plano Collor) and the one around 1999
(devaluation of the real / “efeito samba”). Many Brazilians ended up in Portugal, also due to
the close historical linkages. Since 1986, when Portugal entered the EU, the country has been
subject to strong social changes in a roller coaster of neoliberal rise and debt crisis. Brazilians
joined other immigrant groups, especially from Cabo Verde, Angola, and later from Eastern
Europe. These people settled in a different Lisbon than the one advertised in tourism. They are
often on a journey of no return.

In this context, Lisbon assumes an emblematic imaginary role as a place of arrival and
reception. This sets the framework for cinematic constructions of Lisbon from a migrants’
perspective. Terra Estrangeira (1996; directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas) is a
largely improvised low budget production (black and white) with unknown faces and faces
familiar from the telenovelas. It has become a cult film in the production of director Walter
Salles (Central Station; The Motorcycle Diaries) and is also the inspiration for Portuguese
filmmaker José Barahona’s literary adaptation of Luiz Ruffato’s tale of an ordinary emigrant’s
fate in Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você (2015).

Further Screenings
Be our guest at other films on Lisbon during winter 2023/24:
Oct. 26 Dans la Ville Blanche (1983; Alain Tanner). German subtitles.
Nov. 2 Zona J (1998; Leonel Vieira). Portuguese subtitles.
Jan. 25 Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você (2015; José Barahona). No subtitles.
February 1 Silêncio – Vozes de Lisboa (2022; Céline Coste Carlisle, Judit Kalmár). German
subtitles.

All films are OV Portuguese. The screenings take place in SH 3.107 of the GU and are free of
charge.
Contact: radlwimmer@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Zoom: https://uni-frankfurt.zoom.us/j/3841032435?pwd=g6AXR92aC8GhUqSvBm7KUqwyo-5lKA

Meeting ID 384 103 2435; Pass: 878754

James Yékú (University of Kansas)  

#EndSARS: Literary-Cultural Activism and the Afterlives of Hashtags

In this talk, Yékú revisits the #EndSARS campaign against police brutality in Nigeria and, by analyzing the social media movement in Nigeria as a significant moment in the brutal exercise of state power as a site of coercion, he examines how everyday digital subjects mobilized literary and cultural productions as oppositional discourses. By reflecting on the creation of a digital archive of poetry and the project’s later remediation as a print anthology, Yékú examines the ways in which hashtags become entangled with literary activism in Nigeria and become reiterable in new temporal and medial frames long after the social movements that activate them.

James Yékú is an Assistant Professor of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas, where he leads the African digital humanities program. He is the author of Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria (Indiana University Press), and a book of poetry, Where the Baedeker Leads (Mawenzi House, Toronto). His current digital projects include Digital Nollywood, an Omeka-based collection of vintage film posters from Nigeria. Yékú was a 2022 fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum and will, in June 2023, be a postdoctoral fellow at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz where he works with the Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia research team.

Tanaka Chidora (Zimbabwe; currently Humboldt Fellow at Goethe University)

And Now the Poets Do Not Speak: The Politics of Representation in Zimbabwean Writing, 1957–2023

Thursday, Feb 2, 2023 6-8 pm | Room 1.812 Campus Westend, Casino Building

In this talk, Tanaka Chidora analyses the politics of representation in Zimbabwean literature, particularly exploring the policing of creative writing from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. He argues that the position of the Zimbabwean writer portends a dilemma that amounts to being gagged from depicting certain truths about the nation or not speaking at all. In Rhodesia, the black writer was under surveillance by the Rhodesia Literature Bureau which forced the writer to focus on issues that were considered apolitical. Those who wanted to confront colonialism head-on published outside Rhodesia, but at a time when the militarily-executed anticolonial struggle was gaining momentum, these writers were expected to demonise colonialism while praising the nationalist movement regardless of existing evidence of it becoming a source of tyranny in the independent nation. The same dilemmas afflict the new crop of Zimbabwe’s writers who feel the need to depict the ills of Zimbabwe. In his exploration of these dilemmas, Chidora makes reference to notable works by creative writers and critics from Zimbabwe and beyond.

Tanaka Chidora is a published poet, short story writer and literary academic from Zimbabwe. His first poetry collection, Because Sadness is Beautiful? (2019) was published to critical acclaim in Zimbabwe and has been widely described as vivid, subversive and scatological. Tanaka is currently based at Goethe University where he is a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow researching on violence, memory and literature in Zimbabwe. His debut novel, Carrying a Country on Your Forehead, is set to be published in 2023.

The exam registration dates for the current term are as follows:

• MCTE Introduction: Registration for written exam from 24 January – 7 February
• MCTE Language Courses (Module MCTE 4): Registration for written exams from 19 January – 30 January
• MCTE Modules 2 and 3: Registration for long term papers (Modulabschlussprüfung) from 27 January – 27 March

The registration process proceeds via QIS/LSF.

Remi Raji (University of Ibadan, Nigeria)

An Album of Anglophone Nigerian Poetry, 1952-2022: A Harvest of Traditions, Talents and Trends

This presentation is a panoptic survey of seven decades of contemporary Nigerian poetry written in English. It is a general discourse of four major generations of poets, with each period marked by their agencies and undercurrents, characteristics, major voices and significations. For its range of publications, contemporary Nigerian writing holds a remarkable fount within African literary space. Although the generational categorisation of modern Nigerian poetry is decidedly a matter of critical convenience, there are notable and established trends and tendencies of the tradition which include socio-political engagment, female consciousness, Niger Delta imagination, ecological sensibilities, and other peculiar aesthetic idioms which project the Nigerian/African condition in symbolic reliefs.

Aderemi Raji-Oyelade (aka Remi Raji) teaches Literature of the African Diaspora, Literary Theory, Creative Writing, and New Media in the Department of English, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His scholarly essays have appeared in journals including Research in African Literatures, ARIEL, Wasafiri, Matatu, and African Literature Today. His book – Playful Blasphemies: Postproverbials as Archetypes of Modernity in Yoruba Culture (2012, rev. 2022) – has received acclaim as a seminal work in contemporary African studies. Raji-Oyelade is the coordinator of a multi-site, pan-African research project on the theory and practices of postproverbials in seven African countries.

A member of Nigeria’s Third Generation writers, Raji’s has read his poems widely in Africa, Europe and America. In 2005, he served as the Guest Writer to the City of Stockholm, Sweden. His volumes of poetry include A Harvest of Laughters (1997), Webs of Remembrance (2001), Shuttlesongs America: A Poetic Guided Tour (2003), Lovesong for My Wasteland (2005), Gather My Blood Rivers of Song (2009), Sea of My Mind (2013) and Wanderer Cantos (2021). His works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian, Latvian and Croatian.

The Global Office invites students to the yearly international week, which takes place virtually from Monday, 7 to Thursday, 10 November 2022.

In numerous events, the Global Office, other departments of Goethe University as well as external organisers will present diverse opportunities for a stay abroad during your studies. In addition, former exchange students will report on their studies abroad. The full programme can be found here.

Furthermore, the Global Office draws attention to the following application deadlines for exchange programmes in the academic year 2023/24:

Direct exchange programmes USA and Canada
Applications are open until 15 November 2022.
Further information: www.uni-frankfurt.de/studyabroad/weltweit

ERASMUS+
Applications are open until 1 February 2023.
Further information: www.uni-frankfurt.de/studyabroad/erasmus

Direct exchange programmes with partner universities in Japan, China, South Korea, Israel, Czech Republic and Brazil 
Applications are open until the beginning of February 2023 (calls for applications will be updated in the course of the winter term 22/23).
Further information: www.uni-frankfurt.de/studyabroad/weltweit

Exchange with universities in Australia as part of the Hessen-Queensland programme in 2024
Application deadline in May 2023 (calls for applications will be updated in spring 2023).
Further information: www.uni-frankfurt.de/studyabroad/australien

Students who would like to apply for a semester abroad in the academic year 2023/24 within the framework of a faculty cooperation (not Erasmus), please register or apply via the following website: www.uni-frankfurt.de/studyabroad/fachbereiche.

Information for freemovers can be found at www.uni-frankfurt.de/studyabroad/freemover. If you are studying abroad as a freemover, please register under this link.

If you have any questions, please contact the Global Office:
For questions about studying abroad: www.uni-frankfurt.de/studyabroad
For questions about internships abroad: www.uni-frankfurt.de/auslandspraktikum

The two-day event convened by Johannes Voelz and Pavan Malreddy “The Affective Logic of Populism: Trust, Distrust, and the Productivity of Conflict” will take place at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg, December 2-3, 2022.

In order to participate you need to please register. To do so click here. The registration deadline is November 18, 2022.

More details and the full programme can be found on the event flyer, which is available here.

The course “Transcultural Ecocriticism: Moving Cultures in Times of Ecological Crisis”, taught by Dr. Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell, has been included in the MCTE syllabus for the winter term 2022/23. You can find all information about this course here.

The Office for Multicultural Affairs of the city of Frankfurt offers an internship starting on 01.06.2022. Please find all details here. Applications must be submitted by 25.04.2022.

Stefanie Kemmerer, an Alumni of the Moving Cultures Masters programme, is the winner of 2022 GAPS (German Asocciation of Anglophone Postcolonial Studies) Graduate Award for her Masters thesis titled “Yogascapes: The Visual Politics of Transcultural Yoga as seen on Instagram“ (supervised by Dr. Pavan Malreddy & Prof. Dr. Schulze-Engler). Both NELK and MCTE proudly celebrate her achievement.

After finishing her Masters, she took up a position at Brill Germany as a Junior Acquisitions Editor. There, she is responsible for evaluating and editing incoming manuscripts, prepare contracts with authors, and catalogues advertising upcoming novelties.

Stefanie has studied Culture and Economy with a focus on Spanish Studies at the Universities of Mannheim and Alcalá de Henares (Spain). In her B.A. thesis she investigated representations of violence and power in the work of Spanish author Julio Llamazares. Before she resumed her studies, she worked as an HR Business Partner and HR specialist. In 2018, she joined Goethe University as an M.A. student in the Moving Cultures – Transcultural Encounters programme and studied Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht.

She can be reached by email: stefanie.kemmerer@gmx.de

AlterNatives by Drew Hayden Taylor

32nd Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien / GAPS)

Contested Solidarities: Agency and Victimhood in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

Goethe University Frankfurt | 26-29 May, 2022

Keynotes/Plenary Speakers/Writers:

Sinan Antoon (Iraq/USA) | Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria) | Blessing Obada (Germany/Nigeria) | Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya) | Michael Rothberg (UCLA) | Arundhati Roy (India)

If Anglophone literatures and cultures worldwide once sprang from a contested terrain of solidarities emerging in the shadow of colonialism, many of them have been struggling with the legacies of these solidarities, with ideals of liberation that turned into new forms of oppression, and with the clamorous or muted appeal of old and new victimhoods for more than half a century now. Ethnic, racial or national victimhood and solidarity have been invoked in a cynical politics of exclusion all over the globe – from an aggressive assertion of Hindu hegemony in India to the militant Buddhism in the guise of nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, the abuse of anticolonialism as an ideology of oppression in Zimbabwe. In a quite different setting, victimhood has also become a mainspring of the anxiety-infested xenophobia spawned by right-wing populism in contemporary Europe. At the same time, the oppression of minorities and the plight of political, economic and environmental refugees has generated new forms of sociality as well as solidarity.

While the 21st century has seen the exhaustion of ‘enchanted’ or ‘unconditional’ solidarities rallying around idealized images of oppressed ‘postcolonial’ or ‘third world’ collectivities, sections of academia continue to see ‘resistance’ as form of catharsis, or even a panacea for a myriad of victimhoods and grievances. Yet, Anglophone literary texts and cultural productions themselves have long since engaged in self-reflexive encounters that have undermined trite formulations of perpetrators and victims and have explored the tribulations of what Michael Rothberg has recently called ‘implicated subjects’ (2019): all modern subjects are involuntarily implicated both in the history of oppression and victimhood, often simultaneously – not only in the formerly colonizing, but also in the formerly colonized regions of the world. More often than not, these implications, which call for a ‘disenchanted’ or ‘conditional’ solidarity that holds the abuses of victimhood in the name of agency accountable, cut across habitual East/West or North/South divides: as large parts of the world are rightly admiring civil resistance against the current military rulers of Myanmar and deploring the overthrow of Aung San Suu Kyi, the memory of how her own government was complicit with the persecution of the Rohingya minority in Burma seems to be waning. At the same time, European admonitions to respect democracy and protect the Rohingya refugees are timely but hardly beyond reproof given the background of calculated misery in its refugee camps in the Mediterranean and unceasing daily deaths at its external frontiers.

The 2022 Annual Conference of the Association for Postcolonial Anglophone Studies (GAPS) will engage in a wide-ranging reassessment of implicated subjects, of the uses and abuses of victimhood, of different forms of agency, and of the manifold implications of English as a medium of literary and cultural expression in anglophone literatures, cultures and media. Participants are invited to scrutinize fictional encounters with ‘internal’ forms of oppression, with the ‘enemy within’ (Nandy) and ‘the danger of a single story’ (Adichie), or the excessive display of wealth and power by local bourgeoisies (Mbembe). They are also encouraged to engage in a self-reflexive discussion on the role of ‘unconditional’ and ‘conditional’ solidarities in Anglophone literary cultures and on the role of victimhood in recent debates on globalization, world literature and the Anthropocene. Furthermore, participants may wish to tackle the new solidarities expressed through concepts such as cosmopolitanism (Appiah), Afropolitanism (Selasi), conviviality (Gilroy) or environmental justice and to explore the role of anglophone literatures and cultures as ‘resources of hope’ (Raymond Williams). Participants are further welcome to focus on transitions from a politics of victimhood to a poetics of agency in anglophone literatures and cultures and to scrutinize the role of English in plurilingual contact zones across the world.

Conference convenors: Dr. Pavan Kumar Malreddy and Prof. Dr. Frank Schulze-Engler, Institute for English and American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt.

Contact: info@gaps2022.com

Please find out more on the conference’s website.

SHIFT Δ SESSION #2

THE FUTURE OF RETURNS

Can works of fiction precipitate restitution?

by SHIFT collective (FR/GER) and Down River Road (KE)

Saturday, January 29th, 2022 | 5 pm EAT / 3 pm CET | online event | please register here

The last few years have seen seismic shifts in the thinking around the restitution of objects held in institutions of the North to African countries. Yet, few objects have actually physically moved. We ask ourselves if this inertia is due to more than just politics and economics. Perhaps it is due to a lack of imagination. How can stories about the fate and ghosts of return help us imagine a future of restitution? Reparation? Home?

How does the future look from a point of restitution? What do the objects find when returning home? What communities gather around them? What histories, narratives and new sociabilities do they trigger and provoke?

The event marks the launch of a new collaborative project by the SHIFT collective and Down River Road, one of the journals currently contributing to the vividness of the literary scene in Nairobi and beyond: an anthology of short stories by Kenyan writers imagining the return of cultural objects back to Kenya. The event will be centered around the reading of the first short story in the anthology, followed by a discussion on a future of restitution and the place of fiction in imagining alternative futures.

Guests:

Alexis Teyie is a Kenyan writer and publisher. Currently Managing Editor, Down River Road.They are a co-founder of Enkare Review (c.2016), and Nairobi-based imprint, Magic Door (c.2020). Books include:  Short Cut  (2015), and  Clay Plates: Broken Records of Kiswahili Proverbs  (2016).

Felix Omondi is a poet, writer, community journalist and a podcaster. A recipient of the 2020 NF2W9 poetry scholarship with poems published in the third issue of down river road magazine. He also translates work into sheng.

Greenman Muleh Mbillo is an Akamba philosopher, artist and traditional healer according to the ancient practice of ‘Kamuti’ or ‘of the tree’. Greenman inherited this practice from birth and was later trained by Kanukwa, a female Akamba philosopher, who delivered him to be educated by Spirit. He is also a partaker of contemporary Western education through both established institutions and private education arrangement. Greenman’s main interests are directed to the archeology 1. of ancient knowledge systems and especially that of the Akamba people, and more broadly, of the Khemetic people who established the African continent.

Ray Mwihaki. Ray is often considered weird but she’d like to assure the general public that it really depends on the hour. She is a writer, reader, artist, mother… living in Nairobi. Her work has been published by Down River Road, World’s Loudest Library, Creative’s Garage, Omenana, The Poetry Project, Arizona State University and UNICEF.

Michelle K. Angwenyi is a writer from Nairobi, Kenya. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Brunel Africa International Poetry Prize, and for the 2017 Short Story Day Africa Prize. She has a chapbook, Grey Latitudes, forthcoming from Akashic Books and the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) in 2020.

–

Down River Road is an online and print journal that publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry and ideas. “We are interested in the margins, in the shifting centres and the new spaces that exist in what we’ve come to call the alternative. We are curious about how we can all imagine and create this world, build this world, shape this small corner of the Internet into a place we can claim.”

SHIFT (Sam Hopkins, Marian Nur Goni, Simon Rittmeier) is a transnational collective working on the intersection of art and research, particularly on issues related to African objects diaspora in the aftermath of colonialism and imperialism.

The event is part of the “Invisible Inventories” exhibition at the Weltkulturenmuseum Frankfurt / Germany

Prof. Frank Schulze-Engler is looking for a Student Assistant to help with organizing editorial work for an international journal

Duration: 20 hours per month from February 2022 to March 2023
Qualifications: Excellent knowledge of English, advanced organisational skills, willingness to work with online editorial computer software.
Applications: Please send your application letter and CV directly to Prof. Dr. Frank Schulze-Engler (schulze-engler@nelk.uni-frankfurt.de).
Deadline: 24.01.2022

John Sutton (Durham University)

Memory and Distributed Cognition: Inhabiting the Past Together – Notes on Place, Memory, and Re-enactment

Tuesday 30 November 6:15 pm | online via Zoom –> register here

Place and memory are deeply entangled. Their connections are studied in many disparate fields, which are often difficult to move between. After outlining a broadly ‘cognitive-ecological’ framework for understanding ‘place memory’ across distinctive contexts, this talk tries to open some pathways between distinct disciplinary sectors by sketching ideas on two related topics. First, how are the sciences of spatial cognition addressing deep embodied familiarity with places, with specific landscapes or cityscapes or taskscapes, as opposed to the navigation of new or artificial environments? Second, zooming in on social aspects of place memory, what differences does it make when people can collaborate in finding ways to inhabit old or new places together? Here, with reference to historical and contemporary examples from literature, architecture, and performance, I discuss some emotional and political challenges of dealing with historically difficult heritage, and some creative collaborative ways of doing so.

John Sutton‘s research addresses memory, skill, and cognitive history. He is author of Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. His most recent co-edited volume, with Kath Bicknell, is Collaborative Embodied Performance: Ecologies of Skill, which will be published by Bloomsbury in January. Sutton is currently spending a term as Visiting Fellow at Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study working on their interdisciplinary project Representing Memory.

New Frontiers in Memory Studies is a lecture series by the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform.

The Africa Chapter of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) will be holding its annual conference as an online event on November 24 & 25, 2021:

“Memory in Africa: State of the Field”

Please click here for the programme (includes all Zoom links).

The event is convened by Atabongwoung Gallous & Bridget Modema (University of Pretoria), and Hanna Teichler (Goethe University Frankfurt).

Click here for information on the work of the Nobel laureate and his visits to Goethe University Frankfurt.

Tatjana Louis (Los Andes University, Bogotá)

Peace, War, and how we Talk about it: A Discourse Analysis of Colombian History Schoolbooks

Tuesday 13 July | 6pm | online via Zoom | click here to register

Desaprender la guerra – “unlearning” war – is a central demand of peace education in Colombia, which is intended to contribute to socially overcoming the decades-old conflict. An important role is played by history education, which in 2017 was explicitly assigned the task of contributing to peace and reconciliation through historical memory by Law No. 1874. But what discursive offers exist at all to talk about the past in such a way that it contributes to reconciliation and peace? This lecture takes a close look at textbooks for history lessons and examines how war and peace are represented in the texts, how responsibilities are attributed, what social and individual scope for action is shown, and what assignments of meaning are constructed in the narrative.

Wednesday, June 16, 2021 | 12.30 CEST | 16.00 IST | Online

Participating:

Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, IIT Madras

Prof. Raghunathan Rengaswamy, Dean (Global Engagement), IIT Madras

Mr. Rajendra Prasad Narla, Chief Archivist, Tata Central Archives

Prof. Astrid Erll, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Director, Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform

Dr. Hanna Teichler, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Co-Director, Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, Acting President, Memory Studies Association

Dr. Avishek Parui, IIT Madras, Chairperson, Indian Network for Memory Studies

Dr. Merin Simi Raj, IIT Madras, Chairperson, Indian Network for Memory Studies

Click here to register by 10 June 2021.

For queries write to memorystudiesiitm@gmail.com.

Sourit Bhattacharya (Glasgow)

Tea Sindbæk Andersen and Jessica Ortner (University of Copenhagen)

Mnemonic Migration – Transcultural Circulation and Reception of Post-Yugoslav War Time Memories

Author meets Students:  A Conversation  with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor 

February 15th 2021 

ZOOM/ 12.00-14.00 CET 

To register, please click HERE 

We kindly invite you to participate in a discussion with Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. The conversation will focus on her novel Dust (2013), which explores the many facets of post-independent Kenya. Her novel was shortlisted for the Folio Prize and won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 2015. This student-led discussion is part of Dr. Hanna Teichler’s seminar “Transoceanic Imaginaries” and has been facilitated by the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform. 

Kai Wiegandt (Tübingen)

Neo-Imperial Gothic: Western Migrant Fiction’s Imagination of Reverse Domination

Thursday, 4 Feb 21, 6 pm, c.t. Zoom

Late nineteenth and early twentieth century reverse colonization narratives, subsumed under the rubric ‘imperial gothic’ by Patrick Brantlinger, featured invasions from the colonial periphery to the imperial centre. This paper argues that recent decades have seen the emergence of similar ‘reverse domination narratives’. The narratives feature the migration of professionals from the Global North to the new economic centres in the Global South, where the migrants occupy subservient, quasi-colonised positions. As in the case of nineteenth century reverse colonization narratives, gothic elements underpin the reversal of dominance. I read the narratives as symptoms of Northern anxiety of losing economic, political and cultural influence to regions perceived as threats to global dominance.

Kai Wiegandt is Heisenberg Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Tübingen. In April 2021 he will start as Professor of Literature at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin. He studied English and German literature and philosophy at Universität Freiburg, Yale University and at Freie Universität Berlin and is the author of Crowd and Rumour in Shakespeare(Ashgate 2012) and J.M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form (Palgrave 2019). He has published on early modern, modernist and postcolonial as well as world literature. In 2014 he was elected member of the German Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

The Syntax of Everyday Injustice: A Reading & Conversation with Arundhati Roy

Moderator: Pavan Malreddy

22 January 2021
ZOOM/ 10.00-12.00 hrs. CET,
14:30-16:30 hrs. IST

No Registration for IEAS members.

All others, register at: pavanmalreddy@protonmail.com

Arundhati Roy is a world-renowned writer. She writes of the connections between caste, class, capitalism and imperialism. Her two novels, The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), have amassed readership in more than forty languages. Her extensive non-fictional work – Walking with the Comrades, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, My Seditious Heart, among others – draws attention to how capitalism and privatisation have undermined democracy, devastated the environment and accelerated the race to irreversible climate change. Both her fiction and non-fiction have been subject to lively – at times heated – scholarly debates both within and outside of India. This reading and conversation will be based on her recent collections of essays titled Azadi – Freedom. Fascism. Fiction(2020).

“In Transit|ion – Frankfurt Lectures in Literary and Cultural Studies” is a prestigious lecture series organized by the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Twice a semester, leading scholars and writers from around the world present their work in the fields of American Studies, English Studies, and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.