Date:
Thursday, November 17, 2022, 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Location:
Nebel Room, Barker 359
German and Comparative Literary Studies, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, have offered a very rich body of scholarship on exile, exilic authors, and exile literatures. The focus on the exilic subject as an extraordinary subject, an author, or artist has led to a neglect of the figure of the refugee, considered even by Edward Said as part of masses with ration cards, with no “tellable stories.” Addressing this hierarchy, in this paper I underscore the urgency to elevate and centralize refuge and forced migration as frameworks of reading and units of world literary comparisons. Drawing on the British Germanist and Comparatist S.S. Prawer’s Comparative Literary Studies (1973) and David Damrosch’s Comparing the Literatures (2020), I propose how a focus on “Unsettlement” can today carve new paths for reading German/ European literatures with literatures from the Global South. Drawing on my current book project, Tales of Unsettlement, I propose that the focus on the figure of a refugee or forced migrant can help us uncover much longer “hyperlinked” histories of imperialism, colonialism, and racism.
See also: Lecture
![Brandt collage Untitled [with Anna May Wong]](https://german.fas.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_files_xxlarge/public/germanic/files/brandt_untitled-anna-may-wong_1024x413.jpg?m=1621865503&itok=JTJAkh28)