From 'Where are you from?' to 'Where shall we go together?' Re-imagining Home and Belonging in 21st-Century Women's Writing
- Event type
- Conference
- Speakers
- Gladys Abdoul (), Dominique Carlini Versini (), Karolin Machtans (), Ricarda Vidal (King's College London), Manuela Perteghella (Open University / Warwick University), Chekwube Anyaegbunam (University of Frankfurt), Katie Brown (University of Exeter), Zhila Gholami (Griffith University), Rebecca Braun (), Claudia Gremler (), Ulrike Zitzlsperger (), Sasha Marianna Salzmann (), Bilgin Ayata (University of Basle), Alexandra Ludewig (), Linda Shortt (), Anissa Talahite-Moodley (), Annette Buehler-Dietrich (), Francesco Albe (), Gisela Holfter (), Tuende Varga (Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts), Godela Weiss-Sussex ()
- Event dates
- Contact
- elizabeth.dearnley@sas.ac.uk 020 7862 8726
In this era of mass migration, questions of home and belonging emerge with new urgency in public discussion in many European nations, not least because they are being mobilised in (right-wing) populist discourse. Focusing on recent literary imaginaries and discussions of home and belonging by women writers across cultures, this conference seeks to gain an understanding of the possibilities of intervening in traditionally held ideas, and of contributing to the formation of alternative, inclusive and future-oriented conceptualisations of belonging which allow us to think ambiguous, multiple and/or shifting attachments.
Exploring cultural enunciations that lead away from binary definitions of inclusion/exclusion, the conference will build on research on the changing concepts of home and belonging, not as idealised stability, but as fluid in terms of space and time. Home emerges as a place that can and needs to be invested with meaning and constantly (re-)negotiated. It will take into account the crucial distinction between new conceptualisations of home after voluntary migration (which may entail the concepts of agency and contingency and may thus support ideas of self-determination of belonging and transitory attachments) and the search for refuge after enforced migration, which calls for an ethics of relationality, particularly suited to recognising and building new communities or ‘collectives’ across diversity and alterity.
The frames of reference outlined by Braidotti, Massey and Ahmed are intrinsically connected with feminist thought, and indeed, there is a tradition of enunciating alternative, more open and fluid concepts of home in women’s writing. This conference will investigate to what extent recent and current literature by female writers across languages and cultures follows in the footsteps of this tradition.
Keynote Speakers: Political scientist Bilgin Ayata (University of Graz) and the conference exhibition curators Ricarda Vidal (King’s College London) and Manuela Perteghella (Open University)
Conference Organisers: Maria Roca Lizarazu (University of Birmingham) and Godela Weiss-Sussex (Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London)
Structure:
Programme (PDF)
Wednesday 23 September
11.30-12.30 BST Round Table One: Making Alternative Homes. Discussion based on:
Alexandra Ludewig (University of Western Australia): Of Wolf, Woman and Migrant: Place Making in a Contemporary Narrative from Switzerland
Tünde Varga (Hungarian University of Fine Arts) and Daniela Jáuregui: Cultural Imagination: Transferring the Indigenous Everyday in Art
Linda Shortt (University of Warwick): 'The Opposite of Homelessness': Homemaking and Wilful Dislocation in Esther Kinsky's Am Fluß [By the River] (2015)
Anissa Talahite-Moodley (Royal Holloway, University of London): Home and Belonging in the Literature by Algerian-Canadian Women Writers
Respondent: Katie Brown (University of Exeter)
12.30-13.15 BST: Break
13.15-14.15 BST: Keynote Lecture
Bilgin Ayata(University of Graz): Deheimatize Belonging: Resisting the Politics of Home and Homeland
14.15-14.30 BST: Break
Annette Bühler-Dietrich (University of Stuttgart): Beyond Home and Heterosexuality. Léonora Miano's Crépuscule du tourment (Twilight of Torment)
14.30-15.15 BST Round Table Two. Queering Home. Discussion based on:
Francesco Albé (University of Cambridge): Queering the 'Home': (Con)fusion of Identity Narratives in Sasha Marianna Salzmann's Ausser Sich (2017)
Respondent: Tom Smith (University of St Andrews)
Thursday 24 September
11.00-12.00 BST Round Table Three: Longing for a (Different) Home. Discussion based on:
Rebecca Braun (Lancaster University): Really Existing Utopias: Trends in 21st-Century German-Language Writing by Women
Claudia Gremler (Aston University): Visions of Scandinavia as an 'alternative Heimat' [alternative home] in 21st-Century German-Language Women's Writing
Ulrike Zitzlsperger (University of Exeter): Down and Out in BerlinKatie Brown (University of Exeter): Home as Limbo in Venezuela: A Study of the Play Ni que nos vayamos nos podemos ir
Respondent: Linda Shortt (University of Warwick)
12.00-12.15 BST: Break
12.15-13.00 BST: Curatorial Introduction to Conference Exhibition (which can be viewed online here)
Ricarda Vidal (King's College London) and Manuela Perteghella
(Open University): Home on the Move - Poetry, Migration, Translation
13.00-13.45 BST: Break
13.45-14.45 BST Round Table Four: Displacement and Home. Discussion Based on:
Dominique Carlini Versini (Durham University): Impossible Homes in Nathacha Appanah's Tropiques de la Violence [Tropics of violence]
Gladys A. Zanafy (University of Antananarivo): Building Homes and Patching Up Identities to Belong: Reading Women Protagonists' Life Choices in the Short Stories of Adichie and Lahri
Respondent: Annette Bühler-Dietrich (University of Stuttgart)
Advance registration before 18 September 2020 is essential.
Organised by the Institute of Modern Languages Research, and sponsored by the University of London John Coffin Trust, the AHRC-funded Open World Research Initiative (OWRI), and the Leverhulme Trust. It is part of the OWRI Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community, Translingual Strand.
