Konturen: Vol 11 (2020)
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Writing Migration
This issue edited by Jeffrey S. Librett with Ahmad Nadalizadeh as assistant editor.
“Writing migration”: our title comprises a mixture of heterogeneous terms, like a mixed metaphor, insofar as movement of peoples seems so concrete, as movement of living, breathing subjective spirits, while writing remains abstract; the former so alive, the latter—the letter--so dead. Or so we usually think, even without having to think it. We know that migration experiences can be written down, but we think of the migration and the writing as two fundamentally different types of experiences, two quite different types of thing. Our point of departure in the organization of this special issue was—in contrast to these overly simple conventions—a curiosity about the ways in which the two structurally intersect: writing migrates, and migration writes.
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Item Open Access Manlio Graziano, What is a Border? Stanford Briefs, 2018.(University of Oregon, 2020) Klueppel, JoschaReview EssayItem Open Access Borders, Migrants, and Writing(University of Oregon, 2020) Nail, ThomasWe tend to think of migrants as moving between states and borders as fortifications of states. I would like to prove the reverse: that migrants produce and reproduce the state in the first place. I think we have got this story backward, and I think a very different politics would arise by getting this the right way round. I would like to try and rethink political philosophy starting from the figure of the migrant.Item Open Access Brown Eyed Boy: Narrating Internalized Oppression and Misogynoir in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Everything I Don’t Remember(University of Oregon, 2020) Meir-Cruz, BenjaminThe rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing extremism in Sweden in the wake of growing migration has affected Sweden’s global reputation as a model progressive welfare state that prioritizes human rights and generously extends citizenship, welfare, and labor rights to migrants and asylum seekers. In Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Allt jag inte minns [Everything I Don’t Remember] (2015), xenophobia, Islamophobia, and racialized heteronormativity appear in the unlikely form of Vandad, a hypermasculine Muslim immigrant who has secretly fallen in love with another Swedish Arab man. This study involves a narratological analysis of how internalized racism inspires the novel’s narrator of color to produce figurative narrative acts of internal colonialism—that is, violent narrative acts, made possible by the effects of racism, against other non-white characters in the story. The essay additionally explores how the objectification of non-white women’s bodies and acts of misogynoir, the anti-Black misogyny that Black women experience, by queer men of color in the text operate as secondhand technologies of oppression manufactured by the political discourse of the extreme right. The essay concludes with a critique of the far right’s exploitation of collective cultural memory to mass-produce white nationalism in the guise of tradition and the implications this has for non-white Swedes and migrants in Sweden.Item Open Access “More Than a Trip”: Migration as Memory, Mobility and Space in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004)(University of Oregon, 2020) Masterson-Algar, AraceliIn Un Franco, 14 Pesetas (2004), Carlos Iglesias tells the story of Spanish migration to Central Europe during the 1960s through a fictional remembering of his family’s years as immigrants to Uzwil, in the Swiss eastern province of Toggenburg. His memories of the Swiss landscape, luminous, green, and open contrast with a grim, grey and enclosed Madrid, both origin and end of the six-year journey. This essay explores the interrelation between memory, space, and human mobility in Un Franco, 14 Pesetas. Through a journey of migration to Switzerland, Iglesias tells a story of return to Madrid, and unveils the contradictions of Spain’s so-called ‘economic miracle’ of the 1960s. Merging experiences of arrival and departure, presents and pasts, Iglesias’s film shows how immigration is rooted in space, and inseparable from economic, political and social processes that are historically specific.Item Open Access The Impossibility of Return: Güney Dal and the Exilic Condition(University of Oregon, 2020) Reisoğlu, Mert BahadırThis article examines the role exile plays in the works of the first generation of Turkish German authors by focusing on Güney Dal. The first part of the article deals with Güney Dal’s interviews with other Turkish German authors in 1983. Even though the authors interviewed by Dal do not consider themselves exiles, I show that exilic consciousness is marked not only by the impossibility of returning home, a condition that the authors interviewed deny sharing with exiles, but also by the fact that the exilic subject is already displaced within and is as such unable to be at home. In the second part, I interpret Dal’s novel Eine Kurze Reise nach Gallipoli (1994), which he wrote after moving back to Turkey, as a work that showcases this insurmountable uprootedness and argue that Dal’s modernist novel shows that the disintegration of exilic consciousness can establish a link with political and ethical issues beyond the reach of the isolated and paranoid subject.Item Open Access A Staged Migration to Europe: Özdamar’s Perikızı and Transgenerational Trauma(University of Oregon, 2020) Aksin, JocelynJocelyn Aksin’s research is based in Turkish-German studies with a focus on transnational memory. She has published on the role of Turkish newspapers in Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn and Bitteres Wasser by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and received her Ph. D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014 with a dissertation on representations of memory in Turkish-German novels by Zafer Şenocak, Aras Ören, Feridun Zaimoğlu, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Jocelyn began studying Turkish as a graduate student in the German program at Washington University, and was awarded a fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey for advanced Turkish language study at Boğaziçi University (Bosphorus University). After spending nearly eight years in Istanbul where she completed her dissertation and worked as a language teacher, Jocelyn relocated to Greensboro, N.C. and joined the German Program at UNCG as a lecturer in 2018.Item Open Access “We Can Do It” [Wir schaffen das] – Creative Impulses Through Migration (a Report from September 2017, with an Afterword on the Situation Today)(University of Oregon, 2020) Scholl, Sabine; Translated by Joscha KlueppelGeopolitical changes have always caused human beings to leave their domiciles and seek new homelands. The countries that accept them profit both from their capacity to work and their creative potential. In recent decades, Germany too has come to define itself as a land of immigrants, and in the meantime the effects of the arrival of people from Eastern countries, from Turkey, from the former Yugoslavia after it was destroyed by war, and since 2015 in larger numbers from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, are mirrored in German-language literature. This essay attempts to provide a report on recent authors and new literary publications in connection with current political changes in Germany, e.g. the growth of parties and tendencies hostile to foreigners.Item Open Access Migration’s Alienations: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage(University of Oregon, 2020) Ostmeier, Dorothee; Najjar, Michael MalekBrecht’s so-called anti-war drama Mother Courage and her Children (1939) will be read as a migration drama that demystifies rhetorical cynicism as a coping device for the traumatic torments of migration. By placing Brecht’s work in the context of Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of cynicism, our reading demonstrates how this work adds further perspectives to Thomas Nail’s recent theory of migration and to the discussion of the play’s theatrical production.Item Open Access Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History (1784-91), or: the Anthropological De-struction of “Africa”(University of Oregon, 2020) Ba, Amadou Oury; Translated by Jeffrey S. LibrettIn his work Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History (1784-1791), the preacher and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder deals critically with the philosophy of Enlightenment, in which he sees the seed of a racial and cultural classification that considers peoples outside Europe as inferior. This centrally included Africa and its inhabitants as represented by German philosophers. Such a way of imagining Africa, widely shared amongst thinkers of the Enlightenment, echoes still today in various representations in the Western media, and could even serve as an explanation of the current migration drama in the Mediterranean. Herder, who was well informed of these representations in his own day, attempted, in Ideas, to deconstruct the then prevalent image of Africa and its peoples, and thereby entered into an intellectual dispute with his philosophical contemporaries, whose position was to reaffirm the supremacy of European culture and soe justify slavery and colonialism. This paper first focuses on Herder’s context, then explains his positions and his work, and shows how his attempt ended in a de-construction of the «Africa» of the Enlightenment.Item Open Access Writing Migration: Points of Departure and Arrival in History and Reason(University of Oregon, 2020) Librett, Jeffrey S.Introduction to volume XI of Konturen, Writing Migration.