#  Venkat Mani (Wisconsin) - "Theorizing Unsettlement: World Literary Readings in the Age of Refugees" 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 17, 2022** 

 03:00PM - 05:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Nebel Room, Barker 359**  



 

 



 

   ![Venkat Mani](/sites/g/files/omnuum6781/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/germanic/files/thumbnail_mani_irh_head_shot_july_2021.jpg?itok=fSA2EwKv) 

 

 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. 

 

 



 

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