About the Forum
Focus
The Forum, co-led by Prof. Dr. Nadia Butt and Michelle Stork, investigates global anglophone literatures and cultures, an emerging internatioal and interdisciplinary research area, from a variety of angles. With a geographical focus on South Asia, Africa and the Arab World, the Caribbean, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, the Forum underscores the significance of engaging with literary texts from a transcultural and transnational lens.
Objective
Our objective is to study global anglophone literatures from a de-territorialized perspective. Both the object of study and the field of academic inquiry work across national and cultural borders. Indeed, global anglophone literatures are addressed as literatures ‘on the move’ (Ette 2003) in which patterns of mobility and migration, travelling cultures and communities, home and return, diaspora and flexible citizenship, cosmopolitanism and multiple cultural belongings play an essential role.
Creating Connections
Connecting scholars across borders and disciplines is one of the Forum’s major goals in order to expand and develop the research horizon of global anglophone literatures and cultures, both theoretically and methodologically.
Research Areas
The events and activities of the Forum, an initiative of the Research Centre of Historical Humanities (Forschungszentrum für Historische Geisteswissenschaften FZHG), are centred on the following research areas:
Transcultural and Transnational Studies
Deviating from eighteenth-century notions of culture, put forward by Gottfried Herder, as a singular sphere, research in this area focuses on the transcultural and transnational dimensions as manifested in a literary text, which tends to demonstrate cultural reconfigurations across territorial, national, and cultural borders. As these texts unfold cultural fusions more than fissures, they are treated as spaces of new cultural connections.
Mobility and Migration Studies
As mass movements of people and products are increasingly transforming the world, this area concentrates on investigating complex patterns of global mobility and migration in the wake of present-day cultural translations, as interrogated in global anglophone literatures. Considering multiple modes of mobility and migration, the goal is to analyse the various offshoots of these phenomena, including forced or voluntary migration, nomadism, wanderlust, dis- and replacement, exile, and diaspora.
Moving Cultures, Travelling Genres
In the face of global modernity, cultures are in constant flux, the manifestation of which is prevalent in different literary genres such as autobiographies or memoirs, novels or short stories, prison diaries or refugee narratives, epistolary narrative or journal writing. All of them are treated as ‘travelling genres’ (Cohen 2003), since they not only bring out the dynamics of moving cultures but also converge and coalesce with several other genres.
Study Groups & Research Networks
Literary Auto/Mobility Studies Network
Arab Feminism Reading Group (student-led)
Events
The Forum meetings usually take place on Thursday evenings, 6-8pm. Please check the schedule for more information.
Melanie Frey (University of Konstanz): 'I Guess There Must Be Pioneer Blood in Our Veins': Pioneering Nostalgia in Early Automobile Travel Writing
02 May 2024, 6-8pm, IG 1.314 (Eisenhower Room)
Touring the American landscape has been hailed as “a ritual of American citizenship” (Shaffer 2001) with the car as one of the most important vehicles – if not the most important one – for this kind of exploration. It allows for the expression of individualism and freedom, and to “imbibe the spirit or essence of America and rekindle [one’s] sense of patriotism” (Shaffer 2001). With the mass-acquisition of cars from the 1920s onwards, scholarly research has focused mainly on automobile touring as an increasingly popular past-time activity often referred to as “gypsying” (Belasco 1979). However, Americans already felt a need to ‘rekindle’ their patriotism in the two decades before that; Turner’s proclaimed closing of the frontier in 1893, growing social unrest and the perceived erosion of “traditional values” left members of the American society around the turn of the 20th century feeling adrift and yearning for a nostalgic past with national purpose.
Using early automobile travel narratives between 1900-1920 by authors such as James W. Abbott, Florence M. Trinkle, and Charles B. Shanks, I will highlight how these texts make frontier nostalgia visible and in which ways automobile touring poses the motorist as a new type of “pioneer”. I will expand on Shaffer’s suggestion that the process of exploring the country via travel made tourists “better Americans” (142), by focusing on the presentation and emulation of pioneer experiences in these early automobile narratives. I suggest that early motorists referenced pioneer and immigrant history in their automobile travel writings to – literally or figuratively – follow their trails in order to (re)connect with a national frontier and exploration narrative, with a goal of engaging with their feelings of nostalgia to ultimately “settle” into their current American citizenship.
Melanie Frey is a doctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz and member of the ERC-funded research project "Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility." Using fictional and nonfictional automobile narratives between 1890-1930, she examines the formation of the road trip as a genre. Her dissertation’s aim is to find and analyze previously unexamined road literature in the context of antecedent travel writing – pioneer narratives between 1820-1860 – to highlight which methods, tropes, and strategies were employed to articulate this new form of travel in American literature.
Prof. Dr. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, FBA (King's College): Transoceanic Belonging: Activating Memories of Portuguese Presence in Goa
6 June 2024, 6-8pm, Cas 1.801 (Renate von Metzler-Saal)
This lecture will explore how the memory of Portuguese presence in Goa has been recollected by authors of Goan heritage representing different generations -- e.g. Lambert Mascarenhas’ ‘Sorrowing lies my Land’ (1955), Maria Aurora Couto’s ‘Goa: A Daughter’s Story’ (2004), and Suneeta Peres da Costa’s ‘Saudade’ (2019). I will read these literary texts within the memory work being undertaken in the post-Pandemic moment by a range of entrepreneurs within Goa’s creative economy as well as an increasing body of artists returning to the rich musical legacy of the Portuguese empire. From Nehru’s India, when Goa got absorbed into the Indian Union, to the early years of Hindutva ascendancy, and now to Modi’s India, turning to the history connecting Portugal to India represent conscious acts of memorialisation by these diverse cultural actors. Their literary, embodied, and performed interventions activate memories of transoceanic belonging whose postcolonial significance I draw out through theories of interimperiality, archipelagicity, and creolisation.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. She researches the intersection of the written text with other forms of cultural expression within acts of collective memorialization and forgetting. She is currently writing ‘Alegropolitics: Connecting on the Afromodern Dance Floor.’ Her new research projects explore further the concepts of transoceanic creolization through cultural production across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
Through an ERC Advanced Grant (2013-2018), she led ‘Modern Moves’, an interdisciplinary investigation into African-heritage social dance and music. For her innovative work in the Humanities, she received the Infosys Humanities Prize (2018), awarded by the Infosys Science Foundation, India, and the Humboldt Forschungspreis (Humboldt Prize, 2018), awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Germany.
Prof. Dr. Claire Chambers (University of York): Breaking Down Walls in Post-Pandemic Fables: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man
27 June 2024, 6-8pm, IG 1.314 (Eisenhower Room)
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) and Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man (2022) are fables that indirectly engage with the Covid-19 pandemic. While neither novel explicitly mentions the pandemic, they offer profound reflections on this period in our history and its repercussions. Ishiguro uses a childlike lens to explore a dystopian world involving artificial intelligence and gene editing. Hamid elliptically addresses the pandemic in the context of a resurgence of racism and the resilient response from Black Lives Matter activists over the last half-decade. I draw on trauma theory by Cathy Caruth (1996) and Stef Craps (2013) to examine their oblique representations of the pandemic and the way it triggers reflections on other traumas. The pandemic’s inherently challenging nature for direct representation is echoed in observations by Alfred Thomas (2022), Elizabeth Outka (2020), and David Arnold (2022), who note the complexities in depicting pandemics. While these novels touch on themes of disease, death, and bereavement, they primarily focus on loneliness, digital dependency, and the societal divisions that have arisen, especially since 2016 due to events such as Brexit and the election of Trump. Ishiguro and Hamid’s transnational narratives encourage breaking down the metaphorical and physical barriers that have divided us. Through their fable-like storytelling, these authors strive to connect people and blur the lines that separate us.
Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York. She joined the Department of English and Related Literature as Lecturer in 2012, following eight years as a Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and a PhD at the University of Leeds. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016 and to Professor in 2020. Her current research project is the monograph Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health and Decoronial Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025). This book will explore global literary representations of malaria, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, the 1918 Flu pandemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of race and (neo)colonialism.
Melanie Ashe (Monash): 40 Years of the Wasteland: The Making of Mad Max in Far West NSW
4 July 2024, 4-6pm, IG 1.314 (Eisenhower Room)
This guest lecture will take place on Zoom.
More information will follow soon.
Book Launch: Kathrin Bartha Mitchell’s Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2024)
11 July 2024, 6-8pm, IG 1.314 (Eisenhower Room)
