Meditating Migration. Meta/Textualities in Transcultural African Narratives
- Ort: Berlin
- Beginn: 07.07.13
- Ende: 09.07.13
- Disziplinen: Literaturwissenschaft
- Sprachen: Französisch, Sprachenübergreifend
Transcultural African literatures and films have predominantly been studied within their social contexts of displacement, migration, and Diaspora. Whilst these are still relevant categories, this colloquium seeks to privilege the singularity of migrant texts over context and overarching cultural paradigms. Rather than interpreting literary narratives and films of African migrants for their ideological effects, we encourage a focus on their creativity, their intrinsic and textually complex structures. Therefore, the approach of this colloquium shifts to analyses of literary tropes and aesthetic choices to represent mobility, hybridity and identity formations. Transcultural experiences provide not only unique insight into social and cultural tensions but also generate specific textualities and offer opportunities for creative aesthetic expression. Textually or medially constructed discourses in the context of migration involve different strategies of switching, sampling, fluctuating and collating. Migrant writers and filmmakers adopt transcultural and translinguistic strategies in order to accommodate several cultural systems and communities in which their aesthetic products are received. What are the aesthetic moves through which narratives express the experience of migration? How can we define migrant aesthetics? How do these aesthetics manifest themselves in different narrative genres such as prose and poetry, film and theatre?
Following Genette’s pattern of manifold textualities of a text (namely intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, hypertextuality, and architextuality – a model that can also be challenged or expanded), we are particularly interested in the dimension of the text as a network of different layers which constitute it as a complex sign of interconnected meanings. Narrative strategies in texts of migration inside Africa or between Africa and other continents often include an autoreflexive, metatextual level which signifies that i.e. novels or films contain a meditation on their own meaning. How does the metatextual dimension of the text affect its other textualities? What effects does it involve and how does its structure the reception? In what way does meditation as a writing mode which ruptures spatial and temporal action add new dimensions to migrant stories, within or beyond political claims? By recalling the theoretical implications and questions raised by models of textualities – which might significantly reinvigorate the critical reflection about the originality of migrant narrative production – we would like to invite participants in this colloquium to pay particular attention to different formal practices of African transcultural writing and filming. By focusing on migrant meditations we want to highlight compositional structures in narratives that inform the ways transculturality is creatively conceived and expressed in African migrant literatures and arts.
Programme
Sunday 7 July
Conference Opening with Keynote & Performance
Venue: Jazzkeller Kunstfabrik Schlot, Invalidenstraße 117
16:00: Welcome Address/mots d’ouverture: Susanne Gehrmann
Welcome Address by the head of Humboldt University’s International Office: Ursula Hans
16:30: Key-Note Lecture by Abdulrazak Gurnah: Reflections on Arrival and Disembarkation, introduced by Tina Steiner
17:30: Performance/Contribution artistique par Mansour Ciss, introduit par Ibrahima Diagne
Monday 8 July
Venue: Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, Invalidenstraße 118, Salle/Room 315
9.00 – 10.30 Panel 1: Détours, métadiscours et traces autobiographiques du texte migrant (Modération : Susanne Gehrmann)
Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Universität des Saarlandes): Métissage et migrations. Fictions, expériences autobiographiques et métadiscours dans l’œuvre d’Henri Lopes
Gibson Ncube (Stellenbosch): Fluctuation textuelle : vers une (re)construction transméditerranéenne de la sexualité « marginale » : Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa, Eyet-Chékib Djaziri et Ilmann Bel
Ibrahima Diagne (UCAD) : Poétique de lecture et éthique de l ́écriture : traces intertextuelles et métadiscursives dans les récits de l ́immigration africaine en Allemagne
10.30 – 11.00 Tea Break/Pause café
11.00- 12. 30 Panel 2: Narrating and Performing the Migrant & Diasporic Self (Moderation: Tina Steiner)
James Ocita (Makerere University): Globality and Cultural Pluralism in the New Diasporic East African Asian Narratives
Marie Kruger (Iowa University): Migrations of the Poet: The Aesthetic Transformations of Shailja Patel’s Migritude
Lutz Diegner (HU-Berlin): When Mize puts one over on Self – the meta/textuality of identity and fraGmenTatiOn in contemporary Swahili novels
12.30-14.00 Lunch/déjeuner
14.00- 15.30 Panel 3: Troping Gender and Social Type in transnational narratives (Moderation: Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong)
Ayo A. Coly (Dartmouth College): The Troping of Masculinity in the Afropean Novel
Annie Gagiano (Stellenbosch): Looking Back While Facing the Present: Aminatta Forna, Christina Ali Farah and Sefi Atta’s Contemporary Fictional Re/constructions of African Locations and Perspectives
Louise Green (Stellenbosch): Social Types, Stereotypes and Caricature: Migrant Identities in two South African Detective Novels
15.30-16.00 Tea Break/Pause café
16.00-17.00 Conférence plénière par Fatou Diome : L’Expérience de l’Écriture – The Experience of Writing introduced by Susanne Gehrmann
Tuesday 9 July
Venue: Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, Invalidenstraße 118, Salle/Room 315
9 :00 – 10 :00 Panel 4: L’expression transculturelle de l’Art et de la Musique (Modération : Koffi Anyinefa)
Anne Schelhorn (HU-Berlin): Au milieu du monde – les chansons transculturelles de Rokia Traoré
Maguèye Kassé (UCAD): L’art de Mansour Ciss comme lieu de mémoire et utopie concrète
10.00 – 10.30 Tea Break/Pause café
10:30- 12:00 Panel 5: Narrative Gazes, Relocated Spaces (Moderation: Grace A. Musila)
Babacar Fall (UCAD)/Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (HU-Berlin): The Creation of Space Through Labour in Literary Texts
Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong (HU-Berlin): “Bushfaller Wahala”: Relocating Abroad in Makuchi’s “American Lottery” (1999) and Marie Ndiaye’s “Khady” (2009)
Carlotta van Maltzan (Stellenbosch): Yoko Tawada’s Ethnological Gaze: Travelling Narratives
12.00-13.30 Lunch/Déjeuner
13:30- 15:00 Panel 6: L’imaginaire de la parole migrante : des classiques aux dissidents (Modération: Ibrahima Diagne)
Dame Ndao (UCAD) : Réflexions sur le silence et le vide dans la littérature de l’immigration du Sénégal
Ibou Diop (Universität Potsdam): De la littérature transculturelle à la construction de l’imaginaire africain
Koffi Anyinefa (Haverford College) : Intertextualité et transnationalisme : Beyala, Mabanckou et Tchak
15.00- 15:30 Tea Break/Pause café
15 :30 – 17 :00 Panel 7: Travelling Signs in Eastern African Transnational Narratives (Moderation : James Ocita)
Tina Steiner (Stellenbosch): The Chronotope of the Road in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy
Maria Olaussen (Linnaeus University, Sweden): Discursive strategies of migration in Mia Couto’s novel O Outro Pé da Sereia
Grace A. Musila (Stellenbosch): Intimate Histories: Nostalgia as Critique in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2009) and How to Read the Air (2010)
17.00: Closing Remarks/Conclusion du colloque
Publiziert von: cf