Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
EG.01, Normative Orders Building
17 and 18 July 2025 

Tuesday, January 21, 4pm CET
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

From states to activists, people and communities insert their politics into memorialisation of deaths of unknown strangers at Europe's borders. Memorializing tells something about those who memorialize. This talk discusses the intersections of different memorials and memorial performances, focusing on a decade of afterlives of the Lampedusa shipwreck in 2013. It shows how public memorializing of migrant deaths at borders in Europe serves two functions. First, memorialization is instrumentalized to make a political point or to create a community. Second, memorializing serves a therapeutic function as it helps people to cope with loss or having witnessed mass death – either in person or through the media. The politics of memorialization are multifaceted and can be transformative. In the afterlives of the Lampedusa disaster, Eritrean diasporic politics intersect with European politics creating new identities as survivors and the families of the victims make border violence visible, real and grievable. In doing so, they question the honesty of European values of equality and democracy. They project the unsustainability of the horrific present and future, and in doing so they become part of Europe. 

The talk is based on a book Survival and Witness at Europe's Border (Cornell UP 2023) and a documentary film project Remembering Lampedusa. It is followed by a 15 min section of documentary film The Night My Brother Disappeared (2022) by Anna Blom and Adal Neguse where survivors of the Lampedusa disaster narrate their memories of the disaster and their process of survival.  

November 19, 2024, 4.15 pm
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

The vast amount of data that is readily uploaded through the internet and cloud computing and made accessible to the public has produced a substantial archive of information, which requires the excavation from artificial intelligence now to allow the biological memory to cope with overinformation that it is unable to accommodate by itself. Nevertheless, this emerging technology in the form of artificial intelligence is no longer innocuous. It is capable of not only supplementing human memory in the form of supporting it but also manipulating and even replacing it. This leaves us with more questions than answers concerning the nature of memory regarding human understanding and creativity when dealing with the electronic species capable of exerting influence largely independent of any human involvement.

The discussion here will focus on cinema, which could be considered a repository of human memory to address questions of this nature. Cinema has always sought to position itself as an “intellectual robot" (Jean Epstein) equipped with a “kino-eye" (Dziga Vertov) capable of revealing things that humans may never be able to discern on their own. Nevertheless, cinema has so far been subject to the controlled manipulation of humans. Nonetheless, AI has enabled the intellectual robot to become free, as can be seen in the work of AI Benjamin, a scriptwriter for a few films, whose vision was then interpreted by actors. When given the opportunity, AI Benjamin wrote, directed, and even “acted" in Zone Out, a film prepared from open-source data of online films. Is there anything creative about what AI Benjamin did with its algorithmic manipulation and what it means for human memory when interacting with an active “new memory?"

Room IG 311

John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Global Trespassers: Sanctioned Mobility in Contemporary Culture (LUP, 2024), Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015), Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004), and Beginning Postcolonialism (MUP, 2000), as well as co-editor of the Ohio State University Press book series, 'Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture'.

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November 12, 2024, 4.15 pm
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

Narrative Pace offers a unique perspective for the analysis of memory literature. In memory literature, the change in narrative pace is particularly evident because the representation of memory encourages a variety of narrative pacing strategies – from acceleration to deceleration. My argument is that the five narrative paces influence the way memory is conceptualized. I will use the novel The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni as the basis for my discussion in this lecture. A rewrite of the Indian epic novel Mahabharata is attempted in this novel from the perspective of Draupadi (the female protagonist). In this novel, Draupadi recalls all the events of her childhood, her young self, and everything leading up to the Mahabharat War.  On a self-reflective level, her process of remembering enables her to identify herself.

Through the iterative-durative contraction, a more explicit emphasis is placed on the character's trauma or the timelessness of the content remembered. In contrast, narrative pace summaries and ellipses emphasize the complexity of remembering, the sense of loneliness, and the tension inherent in the story. The use of ellipses does not necessarily mean that the memory is less important, but is rather used in order to advance the plot or to show memory gaps. Due to the narrative pace stretch, a psychological impact is generated, as well as a detailed evaluation and observation of memories. Additionally, the narrative pace pause can sometimes serve as a catalyst for contemplative reflection on one's own existence, as the character recalls. A narrative pace pause may be used to highlight different emotions. As a result of the narrative pace scene, the act of remembering is perceived as a reflexive and dialogic activity. This helps in the process of suturing the memory threads for the purpose of understanding oneself.

Of course these five narrative pace serve a variety of functions that go beyond these; their more significant contribution is to aid in conceptualizing memory.

Tuesday, Nov 5, 4.15 pm
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

In recent years, postcolonial struggles over memory have produced a wave of film productions across various European cinemas. In 2020, the Dutch film De Oost [The East] was released on Amazon Prime. Three years later, in 2023, Der vermessene Mensch [Measures of Men] hit theatres across Germany. These films have a commonality: they cinematically represent underrepresented colonial histories. Moreover, both films were widely promoted as being the first to address particular episodes in Dutch and German colonial history that had been silenced in public discourse/memory. For De Oost it is the structural violence committed by Dutch perpetrators during the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949); for Der vermessene Mensch it is the German genocide against the OvaHerero and Nama people in Namibia (1904-1908). While these topics may seem to promise a decolonial perspective on history, we argue that the films' selective narratives and stereotypical visual representation patterns impose restrictions on this potential. Instead, we will focus our comparative study on the production context of these films with a particular emphasis on distribution and promotion. We contend that the most comprehensive way to understand the cultural meaning of these postcolonial films is to analyse what Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka (2008) call “plurimedial constellations", meaning how these productions evolve in networks of media and social practices of collective memory. We do this by analysing the public debates around these films, asking how these films have been framed in promotion events, and by focusing on the media that are tied into the films. By analysing these plurimedial constellations, we map out how these films – each in its own way – are ambivalent and paradoxical. While they perpetuate elements of colonial thinking, their contextual existence simultaneously destabilises dominant structures of knowledge about the colonial past. Their seeming incongruity is what we propose to be a key element of contemporary European postcolonial memory films.

Arnoud Arps is Assistant Professor of Extended Cinema, Film Heritage and Memory at the University of Amsterdam and Academic Staff Member at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. Prior to this he was a Niels Stensen Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial and Memory Studies at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Los Angeles. His work investigates how the colonial era is transculturally, transnationally, and cross-medially remembered in Indonesia and the Netherlands with a special interest in cinema, literature, and popular culture. More information can be found on his website: www.arnoudarps.com

Kaya de Wolff is a research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. As a media scholar, she engages critically with the intersections of memory, media and communication, (post)colonialism and social justice. Kaya gained her PhD with a dissertation on the struggle for recognition of the genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama in the German press coverage (published by Transcript, 2021, Open Access). She works – jointly with Prof. Dr. Astrid Erll – within the interdisciplinary regional research network “Transformations of Political Violence Centre – TraCe" (2022-2026). Her post-doctoral research project investigates collective memories related to the histories of enslavement, colonialism and dictatorship in Brazil. For more details, see her profile on Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform.

This talk explores the multifaceted exchanges and mediations at work in The Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526), an account written by the diplomat and scholar al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī (today more commonly known as Leo Africanus). Born in Granada and educated in Morocco, al-Wazzān lived at the crossroads of Islamic and Christian worlds. On one of his extensive trips through North and West Africa, he was captured by pirates and taken to Pope Leo X's court in Rome, where he converted (or was forced to convert) to
Christianity. His Cosmography, which he wrote during this time, can be understood as a key source of knowledge about Africa for early modern Europe—it stands as a text that moves across multiple spheres: geographically, linguistically and intellectually.

Al-Wazzān's unique positioning between Africa and Europe allowed him to mediate knowledge about Africa for European audiences while subtly challenging European preconceptions about the continent. As the first detailed account of Africa written by a modern African to reach print in Europe, the Cosmography represents more than just a geographical treatise—it is a dynamic site of early modern cross-cultural exchange and knowledge production. Al-Wazzān's life and work reflect the fluidity of identities and the intricacies of translation as both literal linguistic acts and as metaphorical negotiations between conflicting worldviews. By centring this early modern traveller and a text that journeyed across time, space and multiple translations, this talk hopes to shed light on complex and complicated early-modern encounters between Africa and Europe, positioning both al-Wazzān and the Cosmography as mobile, fluid agents traversing different worlds.

Jennifer Leetsch is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn's excellence cluster, the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, where she is currently working on a project that aims to connect Black life writing to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecologies. She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Würzburg and has recently held fellowships and guest lectureships at the University of Melbourne, the University of Glasgow and Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi. Her first book on contemporary African Diasporic women's writing appeared with Palgrave in 2021, and she is co-editor of Configurations of Migration: Knowledges – Imaginaries – Media (De Gruyter 2023) and editor of a double special issue on Ecological Solidarities across Post/Colonial Worlds (2024).

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Tuesday, October 29, 16:15
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

The dominant narrative in Denmark has long been that Danish colonialism in Greenland was particularly mild and benign, emphasizing the Danes' altruistic efforts to protect the Greenlandic 'people of nature' and help them transition gently into modernity. However, Danish author Iben Mondrup's trilogy of novels – Tabita (2020), Vittu (2022), and Bjørn (2023) – challenges this narrative by depicting the traumatic experiences of two Greenlandic children who are 'stolen' by Danish families and subjected to neglect and trauma. This paper examines the trilogy's potential impact on Danish cultural memory. Drawing on Alison Landsberg's concept of “prosthetic memory", it argues, on the one hand, that the novels can foster empathy and awareness of colonial injustices among Danish readers. On the other hand, it also raises the concern that these prosthetic memories could become what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call “moves to innocence" – strategies allowing Danish readers to alleviate feelings of guilt or discomfort about the ongoing effects of colonialism without actually addressing or dismantling colonial structures.

With statements by Victoria Herche (Cologne), Geoff Rodoreda (Stuttgart) and Dashiell Moore(Sydney).

This book presents an innovative and imaginative reading of contemporary Australian literature in the context of unprecedented ecological crisis. It focuses on notions of colonisation, farming, mining, bioethics, technology, environmental justice and sovereignty and offers 'cosmological readings' of a diverse range of authors—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—as a challenge to the Anthropocene's decline narrative. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of ecocriticism, environmental humanities, and postcolonial and Indigenous studies, with a primary focus on Australian, New Zealand, Oceanic, and Pacific area studies. 

Reviews 
“[This] is an important new work of Australian ecocriticism. Bartha-Mitchell's readings emphasise interconnections between beings, agencies and systems that work against the traditional humanistic focus of western prose fiction and offer a critical new dimension to Australian literary studies." Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia

“An innovative intervention in the environmental humanities, this thought-provoking study of contemporary Australian literature makes a powerful case for the generative concept of cosmos and, more broadly, for the importance of literary studies within the wider field." Diletta De Cristofaro, Assistant Professor, Northumbria University, UK

Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of New English Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt. Her areas of focus are transcultural Anglophone Literature, Ecocriticism and Intergenerational Justice. She earned her PhD within the joint programme between Goethe and Monash University in Melbourne.

This guest lecture will also take place on Zoom. To join on us Zoom, please use the following details:
Meeting ID: 629 9728 6450
Passcode: 776261

The Mad Max franchise has a tense relationship with the geophysical and atmospheric contingencies of far west New South Wales, Australia. In 2011, Mad Max: Fury Road was set to film in the region, taking advantage of the area's known vast arid “outback" plains. However, production was suddenly halted due to recent rainfall in the region. The location had become 'too green' to conform to the apocalyptic stylings of Mad Max. The film was delayed, and eventually ended up being relocated to Namibia, Africa. While the region not being arid enough to perform its duty as a Mad Max location was widely publicised, what is lesser known is that the region has struggled with producing the apocalyptic aesthetic of the films since the 1980s.

This talk unearths 40 years of Mad Max related histories within this region, including production and industry details of Mad Max 2 (1981), Fury Road (2015), and Furiosa (2024) – all (almost) shot on location in far west NSW. Not considering landscape as merely a setting, I situate on-location filmmaking as an industrial practice, asking how the geophysical spaces of this region in Australia have been critical as 'co-producers' in Australia's film history, alongside humans and political economies. Tracking histories of high rainfall and the related boom of plant growth in this regional arid zone alongside film production, I find that  it remains a common production strategy within the region to physically intervene into the geophysical environment. In this way, I find that the film's location shapes Mad Max's aesthetic, but in turn, that film production also shapes the region's environmental spaces.

Drawing from Australian transnational film histories, environmental humanities, media infrastructures and media industry research, this talk forwards a methodology for thinking about Australia's film history and contemporary industry as deeply comingled with the environment.

Melanie Ashe's research explores how resource extraction and management has shaped the Australian moving image and its surrounding industry and cultures, focusing on the region around Broken Hill as a case study. Her research is part of the Australian Research Council funded project,'Remaking the Australian Environment Through Documentary Film and Television'. Previously, she worked in Environmental Communications before completing her Masters in Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.

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.

Masterclass on 3 June at the GCSC, JLU, Gießen

This Masterclass will take an innovative and interactive format with two parts. In the first part, Dr Clara Dawson and other researchers (from JLU and other univrsities) in the environmental humanities will present 'lightning' papers on different aspects of the Environmental Humanities and how its methods apply to their research. Dr Dawson will then provide responses to 'lightning papers', drawing them together into a more general discussion of the issues raised, and broadening to a Q&A with other attendees. The second part of the Masterclass will include a group reading and discussion of several 'texts' (both literary and material) pertaining to the environment and the natural history, which will be provided and contextualised by Dr Dawson. Overall, the Masterclass promises to be an enriching experience for anyone interested in new developments in the Environmental Humanities, as well as an opportunity for those early career researchers pursuing this area to engage in knowledge-transfer and networking with other researchers across this exciting field. It is also an excellent opportunity for advanced BA and MA students in literary studies to leanr about the Environmental Humanities, and to engage with leading scholars in the field.

The line up for "lightning papers" so far includes: Clara Dawson (Manchester), Deborah de Muijnck (Giessen), Dorothea Sawon (Giessen), Oliver Voelker (Frankfurt), Fabricio Belsoff (Giessen), with more to come!

GGK/GCSC | MFR
Otto-Behaghel-Straße 12
35394 Gießen

More info here.

May 14, 2024
4 pm CET
IG 1.414, Campus Westend

This presentation is based on data from interviews conducted with 1005 Croatian respondents about literary texts which they had read, and how they remembered them. It was collected as part of the PoKUS project, focusing on how non-professional readers conceptualize and use literature (https://pokus.ffzg.unizg.hr/en/). It is an ongoing project which serves to record and give a voice to the 99% percent of non-professional literary readers, who have historically been underrepresented compared to the 1% of professional readers (writers, critics, editors, professors, teachers…), whose memories and opinions formulate our collective memory of literature. The presentation will first lay out the project methodology, and then provide its basic findings. These will include an overview of the reader sample, a list of the most remembered texts and writers, and a breakdown of the texts by year of publication and genre. The second part of the presentation will look into some particular aspects of the readers' collective memory, such as the discourse they used to talk about literature, the most impressive parts of the text, the emotions they felt during reading, their reading motivation, writer recognition, and transmedial memory. Finally, as the last and integral part of the presentation, any interested participants may request any information available from the database (e.g., about a particular text or writer). The author will then try to provide a suitable answer based on the data at hand, to demonstrate how well (or not so well) the everyday memories of literature are represented in it.

As part of the internal TraCe workshop “Rethinking Cosmopolitan Memory in Postcolonial Contexts” at Goethe-University on May, 2-3 2024, a public roundtable will take place. The following international guests will share different perspectives on the topic:

• Emily Keightley (Professor of Media and Memory Studies | Loughborough University)
• Danel Levy (Professor of Sociology | Stony Brook University)
• Jocelyn S. Martin (ass. Professor | Faculté des Humanités Université Catholique de L'Ouest)
• Jephta U. Nguherimo (Writer and Reparation Activist | OvaHerero People's Memorial & Reconstruction Foundation)

When? Thursday, 2 May 2024 | 6-8pm

Where? Campus Westend, Goethe University Frankfurt | Casino, Room 1.811

Information and registration c.argast(at)em.uni-frankfurt.de.

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.

This event is part of the Forun of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures led by Prof. Dr. Nadia Butt and Michelle Stork. 

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, co-led by Prof. Dr. Nadia Butt and Michelle Stork, Prof. Butt’s research assistant.

This new Forum provides a room for discussion and connection open to students, staff as well as national and international fellows interested in global anglophone litratures and cultures.

Forum’s Focus and Aims

The Forum investigates global anglophone literatures and cultures, an emerging international 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.

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. 

Invitation to the Launch Event

We warmly invite you to join us on 18 April for the launch event which will take place on 18 April, 6-8pm in room IG 411.

We will begin with a short introduction, an overview of this semester’s programme (including guest lectures by Prof. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Prof. Dr. Claire Chambers; please find the draft programme attached) and give you insight into current research.

Confirmation of Attendance

Please send a short email to Conny Argast (in CC) to let us know if you are planning to attend the launch by 12 April.