Projects

Refugee Talk

Headed by Eva Rask Knudsen and Ulla Rahbek

The current European refugee crisis that peaked in 2015 is bound up in complex issues pertaining to the politics of language. It has been called ‘a multidimensional political crisis’ (William Maley 2016), ‘the defining challenge of our time’ (Alexander Betts and Paul Collier 2017), ‘humanity’s crisis’ (Brad Evans and Zygmunt Bauman 2016), and the question of who and ‘what is a refugee’ has been labelled the key question of our time (Patrick Kingsley 2016). The crisis has been explored from various perspectives, primarily through political, sociological, economic, or media lenses. Unlike such approaches, the Refugee Talk project is designed as a full-scale humanities approach that places ethics and aesthetics at its centre in the critical exploration of texts (academic, journalistic, literary and visual) currently in circulation. It pays special attention, however, to the impact of refugee storytelling and art. The project is based on conversation as research method and thus involves setting up critical dialogues with significant international participants in the refugee debate. Such dialogues will take a point of departure in the need for a new language, indeed a new lexicon, of refuge, one that is ethically sustainable. The project is thus attuned to the forum’s interest in change and exchange across boundaries as well as in the idea of world literature (and art) as a traffic in ideas that impact, in terms of circulation and reception, on our ethical environment. Research findings will eventually be addressed as a series of theoretical and conceptual propositions in a monograph entitled ‘Refugee Talk: Propositions on Ethics and Aesthetics.’ 

Home and Away: The Circulation of Paul Auster’s Verbal and Visual Worlds

Headed by I.B. Siegumfeldt

When thinking about questions concerning ‘world-making’ and ‘globalization,’ we must look (also) at individual vehicles which contribute to the change and exchange of values and ideas across boundaries of nation, language, culture.

Counting thirty books, some of which have been translated into forty languages, the work of Paul Auster, is one such vehicle: a multi-form body of verbal and visual material that has attracted readers and challenged scholars in Europe and the US, Asia and the Middle East for more than four decades. It is firmly lodged in American culture and engages constantly with the European and American canons, even as it frees itself from their paradigms. At the same time, Auster’s work circulates the globe and carries with it a particular understanding of what it means to be human in the modern world that clearly appeals to audiences in all continents. Might it be that it ‘brings out a universal humanity’? (Cheah) It pivots on self-reflexive demonstrations of the multiplicity of ways in which human reality may be represented in words and images that in one way or another derive from Western culture. Might we thus see this oeuvre as a vehicle of cultural diplomacy? Arguably, one of the appeals of Auster’s work is that it is ‘democratic.’ More than most contemporary literature, it has consistently provided frames, or ‘worlds,’ readers are invited to inhabit and engage with. A text by Auster offers itself as an ‘instruction manual’ (von Mossner 2017) that activates embodied simulation (Gallese 2011) in readers who invest their own emotions and experiences of the world in order to give substance to the narrative. Importantly, the writer’s voice never assumes authority over Auster’s texts nor will it presume to have superior understanding or ‘better’ truths, but rather, it provides a perspective at once external to the story and perfectly integrated into the texture of the narrative (Auster and Siegumfeldt 2017). This dialectical force instills a substratum of ambiguity and ‘unknowability’ in the textual universe which sets Auster’s work apart from conventional literary narratives as the task of meaning-making is laid in the hands of the recipient – thus predicating the aesthetic process and product of literature on democratic principles. Moreover, Auster’s penchant for ambiguity, his inscription of indeterminacy and narrative leaps play directly into current debates on democratization and inclusion of the other. These are, I propose, important features by way of which this particular body of writing has become a powerful vehicle of change and exchange in literary worlds across the world.

And so, this project is centrally placed in the Paul Auster Research Library  where core group members, Hugonnier, Varvogli and Siegumfeldt join forces initially to arrange an international conference that looks to select bodies of twenty-first century American literature that circulate the globe to open these questions to further enquiry:

What are the virtues (and vices) by which particular works of verbal and visual art become internationally acknowledged? What is it about them that appeals to audiences throughout the world – across divisions of language, ethnicity, politics, gender and age? What cultural similarities and differences may be transmitted through translation?

Environmental Racism and the Regional-Global Scales of Black Southern Life in Jesmyn Ward’s Writing

Headed by Martyn Bone

The working premise for this new monograph project is that Jesmyn Ward’s prolific body of work over the last decade—three novels, a memoir, and an edited collection--engages deeply with environmental concerns. Most obviously, her National Book Award-winning novels Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) depict the environmental disasters--less “natural” than anthropogenic--of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Deepwater Horizon (2010) respectively. Ward’s writing goes further, however, by exploring the intersection of eco-critical concerns with environmental racism, and across the longer durée of the U.S. South’s fraught past. In doing so, Ward’s fiction and non-fiction relates this regional history of racial (and environmental) segregation to the global scale of neoliberal economics in the twenty-first century.

Ward’s black southern working-class characters—and in the memoir Men We Reaped (2013), her family members and friends--confront what the scholar of environmental racism, Robert Bullard, calls “economic blackmail.” Her black Mississippians have few options in a deindustrialized, deterritorialized economy dominated by poorly paid service jobs and characterized by the outsourcing of blue-collar work beyond U.S. borders. They experience what Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) terms “the plight of the stationary displaced,” whereby “people declared disposable by some ‘new’ economy… find themselves existing out of place in place.” Yet this racialized “disposability” in a post-industrial, neo-liberal, globalized economy is continuous with the much longer labour history--detailed by Carl A. Zimring in Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism (2013)--of African Americans, especially black southerners, doing “‘dirty’ jobs” such as laundry, waste hauling, [and] scrap recycling” even as they were figured as waste themselves.

In tracing this racialized regional history, my project will also locate Ward’s writing in intertextual relationship to earlier representations of “natural” disaster and racialized disposability in the U.S. South by authors including William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright.

Ulysses at 100

Headed by Kiron Ward

At the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 2021, it is highly likely that there will be many publications and events to celebrate the text’s achievement, both as part of the academic ‘Joyce Industry’ and the inevitable promotional campaigns of the Irish government’s Department of Culture, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht. In order to mark this, I am co-editing a collection of essays with E. Paige Miller (University of Miami).

With this collection, we aim to seize the centenary moment in a way that goes beyond the limitations of Joyce studies and that grasps Joyce’s significance to discourses across the globe. Ulysses remains an exceptionally productive archive for generating new and exciting criticism, and as such we want to give scholars the space to articulate why and how this continues to be the case. How does Ulysses and its study, 100 years since it first began dividing opinions, speak to emerging and evolving theoretical issues? What does the world it imagines say about our world? How can we measure its impact across world literature? Moreover, what can we say about Ulysses that will shape its study for the next hundred years, rather than rehearse the status quo of Joyce scholarship? In answering these questions, we will use Ulysses as a lens through which to understand a range of key issues in the study of twenty-first century anglophone world literature.

The Paul Auster Research Library 

Headed by Inge Birgitte Siegumfeldt

  • The international hub for research in the work of Paul Auster
  • the physical home of Auster’s books in all languages
  • the virtual home of electronic manuscripts by Auster in up to 40 languages
  • a forum for conversation and dialogue between writers of Anglophone literature

See project website.