Postmigrant Aesthetics: How to Narrate a Future Europe (Zoom Conference)
Please register by June 22, 2020, at Zoom.
You will be sent a confirmation link for accessing the event online.
June 24, 2020, 8:50am –12:30pm (PST) / 11:50AM–3:30PM (EST) / 18:50-21:30 (CET)
About the Conference
The increased numbers of refugees entering Europe in 2015 put an urgency to discussions on European self-understanding and identity. In which way is Europe, anthropologist Regina Römhild asks, ‘characterized by a long-term presence of migration’ which is partly neglected or made invisible in public discourse (Römhild 2018: 69)? How can we methodologically develop an understanding of Europe as a postmigratory space that is fundamentally shaped by earlier and ongoing migration movements? How can the concept of postmigration help us to grasp the overall negotiations and conflicts taking place in society? In two panels we will examine postmigrant narratives as playing a crucial part in challenging collective core narratives and the politics of belonging in plural societies. Our aim is to establish a set of criteria for a new transformative aesthetics that renegotiates and changes political perspectives. We will thus show how literature and film, by questioning binary concepts of hybridity, diversity, integration and belonging, can provide sociopolitical counter-narratives to Eurocentric, ethnically and nationally centred visions of society and cultural identity. The material investigated reaches from cross-Mediterranean mobilities and autoethnographic writings about Italy and the Balkan region to Algerian-French film, from the indigene Black British novel to German- and Danish-language literatures that address topics such as genealogies of self-making, ecocriticism and radical diversity within a European context. We will further critically discuss the theoretical implications of an aesthetics of postmigration as a possible new analytical turn in cultural studies.
8:50 AM to 9:00 AM (PST) Introduction: Welcome and Acknowledgement
Markus Hallensleben (UBC); Moritz Schramm (SDU)
9:00 AM to 10:20 AM (PST) Panel I: New Perspectives for a Postmigrant Europe
Azadeh Sharifi (LMU, respondent)
Regina Römhild (HU): Silencing a Migrant Past: Neglected Genealogies of European Self-Making in Cross-Mediterranean Mobilities and Entanglements
Francesca Pegorer (UBC): From Friuli, Looking East: Multiple Belongings between Literature and Autoethnography
Moritz Schramm (SDU): Radical Diversity: A New Narrative for Postmigrant Europe?
10:25 AM to 12:10 PM (PST) Panel II: Postmigrant Narratives in European Literature and Film
Katrin Sieg (Georgetown U, respondent)
Markus Hallensleben (UBC): Migrating into European History: From “Dangerous Affinities” to Postmigrant Narratives
Dorothee Leesing (UBC): The High-Rise as Transitional Space: Identity Negotiations in K. Taha’s “Beschreibung einer Krabbenwanderung” (2018)
Alvaro Luna (Université de Limoges and Institut d’études politiques de Paris): Towards an Ecocritical Reading of (Post)migrant Narratives: An Analysis of Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah Dimanche
Sten Moslund (SDU): Postmigrant Revisions of Analytical Concepts to Catch up with the Contemporary Development of Multicultural Literature (The Example of Black British Literature)
12:15-12:30 PM (PST) Internal Wrap-Up Discussion about Plans for Future Collaboration
This event is organized by Markus Hallensleben, Dept. of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, UBC Vancouver, Narratives Research Group, UBC Research Excellence Cluster on Migration.
It was originally planned as two panels of the European Culture Research Network for the CES Conference 2020 on Europe’s Past, Present, and Future: Utopias and Dystopias.
The research for this Zoom event is partially supported by the SSHRC Insight Development Grant on Migration as Core Narrative of Plural Societies.
Please note that the event will be recorded and that questions for each panel will only be taken after the presentations. Audience members will be muted during the presentations.