Over the last decades, the sites from which postcolonial cultural articulations emerge and the sites at which they are received have undergone profound transformation. Given the ‘spatial turn’, human transactions and cultural representations no longer can be understood as firmly rooted in or clearly demarcated by a territorial logic. Postcolonial translocation is a diverse phenomenon that refers not only to processes (incl. the transfer of people, cultural products, and ideas) but also designates a new type of location (a translocation) of fractured and variously connected spaces. As a concept, it exceeds a simple change of location or dislocation and significantly both, points of departure and destination, can remain unspecified.
The seminar will first engage with some theorisations of translocation and related phenomena. In the second part of the seminar we will focus on the analysis of selected literary texts which, one way or another, produce, represent, and/or respond to translocation. The seminar explores the ways in which postcolonial translocation allows us to focus on aspects of texts and contexts which are otherwise difficult to formalise and analyse.
Reading: Before the beginning of the summer term, students are required to finish reading the texts listed here. They will be discussed in the following sequence: (1) Kwame Kwei-Armah; (2) Peter Carey; (3) Adania Shibli.
- Lehrende/r: Mark U. Stein