Institut für England- & Amerikastudien (IEAS)

Magdalena Pfalzgraf, another proud alumini of NELK, wins the 2022 GAPS (German Asocciation of Anglophone  Postcolonial Studies) Dissertation Award for her doctoral thesis "Crossing Borders, Transcending Boundaries: Dynamics of Mobility in post-2000 Zimbabwean Literature in English”, which is published by Routledge.

Her monograph explores the concept of mobility in Zimbabwean works of fiction published in English between the introduction of the controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme and the end of the Mugabe era.

Since 2000, Zimbabwe has experienced unprecedented levels of transnational out-migration in response to the political conflicts and economic downturn often referred to as the Zimbabwe Crisis. This, in turn, has led to an increased outpouring of literary texts about migration, both in locally produced texts and in works by authors based in the diaspora. Situating Zimbabwe’s recent literary developments in a wider context of Southern African writing and history, this book focuses on texts that portray movement within Zimbabwe’s cities, between village and city, to South Africa, and overseas. The author examines important developments and trends in recent Zimbabwean literature, investigating the link between state authoritarianism and control of mobility, and literature’s potential to intervene into dominant political discourses. The book includes in-depth analyses of ten recent works of fiction published in the post-2000 era and develops mobility as a key category of literary analysis of Zimbabwe’s contemporary literatures. Setting out a rich dialogue between literary criticism and mobility studies, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, Southern Africa, migration, and mobility.

Her book is reviewed in the Journal of the African Literature Association

Check Magdalena's profile

Stefanie Kemmerer, an Alumni of the Moving Cultures Masters programme, is the winner of 2022 GAPS (German Asocciation of Anglophone Postcolonial Studies) Graduate Award for her Masters thesis titled "Yogascapes: The Visual Politics of Transcultural Yoga as seen on Instagram“ (supervised by Dr. Pavan Malreddy & Prof. Dr. Schulze-Engler). Both NELK and MCTE proudly celebrate her achievement.

After finishing her Masters, she took up a position at Brill Germany as a Junior Acquisitions Editor. There, she is responsible for evaluating and editing incoming manuscripts, prepare contracts with authors, and catalogues advertising upcoming novelties.

Stefanie has studied Culture and Economy with a focus on Spanish Studies at the Universities of Mannheim and Alcalá de Henares (Spain). In her B.A. thesis she investigated representations of violence and power in the work of Spanish author Julio Llamazares. Before she resumed her studies, she worked as an HR Business Partner and HR specialist. In 2018, she joined Goethe University as an M.A. student in the Moving Cultures – Transcultural Encounters programme and studied Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht.  

She can be reached by email: stefanie.kemmerer(at)gmx.de

CARNIVALIZING RECONCILIATION

Contemporary Australian and Canadian Literature and Film beyond the Victim Paradigm

Hanna Teichler

Volume 8, Worlds of Memory, Berghahn Books
Hardback 978-1-80073-172-1, eBook 978-1-80073-173-8
October 2021 ◦ 274 pages

Transitional justice and national inquiries may be the most established means for coming to terms with traumatic legacies, but it is in the more subtle social and cultural processes of “memory work” that the pitfalls and promises of reconciliation are laid bare. This book analyzes, within the realms of literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is problematic, reproducing simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization. Such fictions of reconciliation venture beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization, offering new opportunities for confronting painful histories.

“Carnivalizing Reconciliation is an ambitious, detailed book with a compelling underlying theoretical premise: namely that reconciliation, thought through the Bakhtinian notion of carnival, is laid bare in all its pitfalls and promise.” • Michael Griffiths, University of Wollongong

Hanna Teichler is a research associate in the department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University, Frankfurt. With Rebekah Vince, she is co-editor of Brill’s Mobilizing Memories series and their Handbook Series in Memory Studies. She is also a member of the Memory Studies Association Executive Committee and Astrid Erll’s Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform.

Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English

Crossing Borders, Transcending Boundaries

Magdalena Pfalzgraf

Routledge, July 2021
Hb: 978-0-367-63781-1
eBook: 978-1-003-14607-0

This monograph explores the concept of mobility in Zimbabwean works of fiction published in English between the introduction of the controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme and the end of the Mugabe era. Situating Zimbabwe’s recent literary developments in a wider context of Southern African writing and history, this book focuses on texts which portray movement within Zimbabwe’s cities, between village and city, to South Africa, and overseas. The author examines important developments and trends in recent Zimbabwean literature, investigating the link between state authoritarianism and control of mobility, and literature’s potential to intervene into dominant political discourses. The book includes in-depth analyses of ten recent works of fiction published in the post-2000 era and develops mobility as a key category of literary analysis of Zimbabwe’s contemporary literatures. Setting out a rich dialogue between literary criticism and mobility studies, this book will be of interest to researchers of African Literature, Southern Africa, migration and mobility.

Magdalena Pfalzgraf is a research associate in the Department of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, and an adjunct faculty member in the New English Literatures and Cultures (NELK) research division at Goethe University, Frankfurt.

Kathrin Bartha, who earned her Ph.D. jointly from Goethe and Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), will take up a position as a Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellow, sponsored by the DFG (German Research Foundation). Her new research project is about intergenerational justice and ventures a comparison of generational conflicts across different times and places as they are imagined in Anglophone film and literature. She is looking forward to spending more time researching and teaching in the NELK department. For more details on Kathrin Bartha's work, please check her profile.

Abdulrazak Gurnah has visited Goethe University four times in recent years:

2004: Lecture and Reading at the international GNEL Conference on “Transcultural English Studies”

Click here for more information (in German).

2011: Keynote Lecture and Reading at International Symposium “Habari ya English – What about Kiswahili?”, February 23-25

Conference Website

Keynote Lecture “Learning to Read”

The keynote lecture was published in Lutz Diegner and Frank Schulze-Engler (ed.), Habari ya English – What about Kiswahili? East Africa as a Literary and Linguistic Contact Zone, Matatu, 46 (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 23-32; https://brill.com/view/title/31655

2016: Annual ZIAF Lecture on “The Return Flight: Writing Migrancy”, 18^thJanuary, 2016

Report (in German, on page 27)

2016: “Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South” Symposium organized by the “Africa’s Asian Options” project (AFRASO), Goethe University Frankfurt, 20/21 January, 2016, Reading and Roundtable Discussion 

Conference Poster

Interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah by three NELK Master students