The UBC Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies will be hosting an online conference entitled Postmigrant Aesthetics: How to narrate a future Europe? on Wednesday, June 24, 2020.
The conference is organized by CENES Associate Professor and Head of the newly-created UBC Migration Narratives Research Group, Markus Hallensleben, along with Regina Römhild (Humboldt University) and Moritz Schramm (University of Southern Denmark)
A full program for the online conference can be accessed here. Those interested in attended are encouraged to register by June 22, 2020.
[ Abstract ]
The increased numbers of refugees entering Europe since 2015 has put an urgency to discussions on European self-understanding and identity. In which way is Europe, anthropologist Regina Römhild asks, ‘characterized by a long-term presence of migration’ which is partly neglected or made invisible in public discourse (Römhild 2018: 69)? How can we methodologically develop an understanding of Europe as a postmigratory space that is fundamentally shaped by earlier and ongoing migration movements? How can the concept of postmigration help us to grasp the overall negotiations and conflicts taking place in society? In two panels we will examine postmigrant narratives as playing a crucial part in challenging collective core narratives and the politics of belonging in plural societies. Our aim is to establish a set of criteria for a new transformative aesthetics that renegotiates and changes political perspectives. We will thus show how literature and film, by questioning binary concepts of hybridity, diversity, integration and belonging, can provide sociopolitical counter-narratives to Eurocentric, ethnically and nationally centred visions of society and cultural identity. The material investigated reaches from cross-mediterrean mobilities and autoethnographic writings about Italy and the Balkan region to Algerian-French film, from the indigene Black British novel to German- and Danish-language literatures that address topics such as genealogies of self-making, ecocriticism and radical diversity within a European context. We will further critically discuss the theoretical implications of an aesthetics of postmigration as a possible new analytical turn in cultural studies.
