Migrant Masculinities in Women’s Writing: (In)Hospitality, Community, Vulnerability

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Speakers:
Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy (Cambridge) 
Lisa Downing (Birmingham) 
Natalie Edwards (Adelaide) 
Christopher Hogarth (South Australia) 

Chair:Amaleena Damlé (Durham)

Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy is joined by Lisa Downing, Natalie Edwards, Chris Hogarth and Amaleena Damlé (Chair), to talk about her new monograph, Migrant Masculinities in Women's Writing: (In)Hospitality, Community, Vulnerability. The book examines the representation of masculinities in contemporary texts written by women who have immigrated into France or Canada from a range of geographical spaces. Exploring works by Léonora Miano (Cameroon), Fatou Diome (Senegal), Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem (Algeria), Ananda Devi (Mauritius), Ying Chen (China) and Kim Thúy (Vietnam), this study charts the extent to which migration generates new ways of understanding and writing masculinities. Kistnareddy draws on diverse theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial theory, affect theory and critical race theory, while bringing visibility to the many women across various historical and geographical terrains who write about (im)migration and the impact on men, even as these women, too, acquire a different position in the new society.

Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy is Director of Studies and Bye-Fellow in Modern and Medieval Languages at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. She lectures for the MML Faculty at Cambridge. She published a first monograph, entitled Locating Hybridity: Creole, Identites and Body Politics in the Novels of Ananda Devi (Peter Lang) in 2015. Migrant Masculinities in Women's Writing: (In)Hospitality, Community, Vulnerability (Palgrave Macmillan) is based on her PhD thesis. She has published on Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah, Maryse Condé, Kim Thúy, Malika Mokeddem, Léonora Miano and Fatou Diome. Her next project focuses on refugee children's narratives (Refugee Afterlives, Liverpool University Press).

Amaleena Damlé is Associate Professor in French at Durham University. Her research interests reside in questions of embodiment, affect, gender, sexuality and race in contemporary French and francophone literature and philosophy. She is the author of The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), and has co-edited, with Gill Rye, three books on twenty-first-century women’s writing in French. Amaleena is currently working on a monograph on the politics of consumption in francophone Mauritian author Ananda Devi’s writing, and a crosscultural project on contemporary narratives of birth.

Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham. She is a specialist in interdisciplinary sexuality studies, critical theory, and the history of cultural concepts, focusing especially on questions of exceptionality, difficulty, and (ab)normality. Her most recent books are After Foucault (as editor, Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Selfish Women (Routledge, 2020). She currently holds a Leverhulme Fellowship to write her next monograph Against Affect.

Natalie Edwards is Professor of French and Deputy Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide. She specialises in contemporary literature in French, especially women’s writing, multilingual writing and transnational writing. Her most recent book is Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves (Routledge 2020). She is currently work with Chris Hogarth on a project funded by the Australian Research Council on French Migrant Writing to Australia.

Christopher Hogarth is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and French at the University of South Australia (Adelaide), where he teaches World Literature especially. Originally a specialist in Senegalese literature, his research focuses particularly on the intersections between Anglophone, Francophone and Italophone African and European literature. He has published and edited several articles and volumes on topics surrounding life writing and migration in Australian, Francophone and Italian literature in journals such as French Cultural Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and L’Esprit Créateur. He is currently at work on an Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project entitled "Transnational Selves: French Narratives of Migration to Australia".