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Migrant Journeys: Histories and Archives
DozentIn: Jatin Wagle
Veranstaltungstyp: Seminar
Ort: nicht angegeben
Zeiten: Mo. 14:00 - 16:00 (wöchentlich)
Beschreibung: It is a truism to state that migrant journeys tend to be precarious and diverse, but they are also difficult to record or narrate, especially when it comes to forced migration. The voices of the itinerant protagonists are drowned in a cacophony that speaks of and for them – the experiences of the homeless, stateless and rightless are often ventriloquized by states and engulfed by national narratives. As Thomas Nail puts it in The Figure of the Migrant (2015), “It is not a natural fact that the history of migrants has become ahistorical, as Hegel argues—it is the violence of states that has rendered the migrant ahistorical” (5). The task of scholarship in this regard is to counter the violence of such historiography and reconstruct “minor histories” of migration which actually flow from the perspectives of migrants. In this seminar in American Studies, we will attempt to explore migrants’ stories in which their voices are heard more-or-less directly. Experiential histories and life stories of migrant journeys in diverse genres, such as life narratives, autobiographies, memoirs, autofictions, and documentaries will be addressed as hybrid and dynamic archives of migration, in that they are constitutive of collective memories and knowledges which help us correct the institutionalized and authorized narratives of migration.
In order to take and enjoy this class, you should be more than willing to read, analyze, and discuss fictional and nonfictional narrative accounts as also theoretical and analytical texts. Please note that this seminar is recommended for advanced master’s students, since it builds on students’ awareness and understanding of the advanced concepts and theories in literary and cultural studies.
We will begin by discussing the following text:
Valeria Luiselli, _Lost Children Archive_ (2019) [ISBN: 978-0-525-43646-1]
(If you haven’t procured a physical copy of the book as yet, please download an e-book.)
Moreover, please watch the following documentary film:
_Which Way Home_. Directed by Rebecca Cammisa, HBO Films, 2009.
Given the confinement measures in effect at present, the following guidelines pertain to all seminars in American Studies offered at IfAA and are the result of an internal consensus with respect to teaching. While each lecturer would have individual plans for her or his seminar, we have all agreed to teach digitally, are prepared to do so for the whole semester and to adapt our teaching and grading to the changed circumstances.
Accordingly, we will also conduct our seminar digitally/online from Monday, 20.04.2020. These changes mean that we would need to be innovative and diligent in terms of how we interact and collaborate. Put simply, this seminar will be very labor-intensive both for you and me and would entail a great deal of reading and writing.
All seminars in American Studies will also work with different Prüfungsformate. This means that grading can, but does not have to be, based on assignments and performances other than the usual seminar paper handed in at the end of the semester. At the moment, I’m still planning to ask you to work toward writing seminar papers, if you need a grade (for modules L3, F2, F3, F5). Further instructions in this regard will be provided later on in the semester.
As part of your assigned work in this seminar, you (i.e., all the course participants) would need to carefully prepare the reading(s) allotted for a session, develop your points of discussion, and if applicable, respond to a few keywords, discussion points or questions that I would post in a wiki set up for the purpose. If you have queries or doubts, they should also be added to this digital, collaborative tool. The due dates for your contributions will be indicated in individual wikis. Pursuant to your interaction and work on the wikis, we will try and conduct brief video conferences initially on a biweekly basis. If our video conferences work reasonably well, we will supplement them with shorter video conferences in which you could make presentations in small groups.
Taking into account the rapidly changing situation around us, we will revisit and amend the course schedule, our strategies of online interaction as well as the course contents on a periodic basis. Readings will be made available in session folders as PDFs.
Prerequisites for participation: B1 module
