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- Convenors:
-
Michelle Tisdel
(National Library of Norway)
Cicilie Fagerlid (Vid Specialized University)
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- Discussant:
-
Helena Wulff
(Stockholm University)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-F315
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
How do authors with ascribed "minority" background articulate notions of self-identity, belonging, and social formations in literature? This panel invites contributions about literature and narratives of staying, moving or settling. We aim to explore their role in (re)defining the self and society.
Long Abstract:
How do authors with ascribed "minority" background articulate notions of self-identity and belonging in literature? The aim of this panel is to explore empirically and theoretically the field known as diaspora, postcolonial, or "minority literature" in different countries. We invite contributions that address the role of this literature and their narratives in (re)defining conditions for self-identity and for cultural and social formations.
Presentations should address the following questions: How do immigrants, descendants of immigrants and other self-identified or ascribed "cultural minorities" articulate and represent notions of self-identity, belonging and society through literature (such as prose, poetry, autobiography, op-eds)? How do their narratives represent imagined communities (Anderson 1983), such as nation and diaspora, and different relationships to them?
Literature that constitutes "new voices" contributes to the circulation of new social narratives. Trouillot (1995) argues that stories and narratives illustrate aspects of "dual historicity," as we simultaneously engage in the sociohistorical process and in narrative constructions about that process. Gullestad (1996) shows how narrative processes and self-historicizing, such as in autobiography, can expose values around which the author centres life and stories about life. Deleuze and Guattari (1986 [1975]) elucidate the subversive potential of minor literatures. This panel also probes if it is useful to employ notions of cultural minorities or "non-white" discourses; and if so, for who, in which contexts and for what purpose or objective?
Keywords: literature, narratives, minorities, diaspora, self-identity, belonging
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Narratives of transhumance are redundant and extremely differentiated: poems, novels, oral literature, audio-visual storytelling and documentaries. They represent one of the forms of reshaping of this traditional practice as an intangible cultural heritage.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists have always devoted much attention to studies on pastoralism and much has been written, in the various ethnographic contexts, about transhumance. Many arratives have been produced and collected about traditional pastoralism: poems, oral literature, novels, images, media narratives and documentaries. This imposes a multidisciplinary approach and a multi-situated ethnography of these different forms of narration in their relationships to the systems of knowledge-practices they are describing, narrating, imagining. Storytelling and witnessing are today opening to a strong revitalization of transhumant narratives. Walking shepherds, vagrant pastoralism become ways of rethinking breeding activities and ways of moving in the pastoral landscape, relationships between local identity and territories, traditions and modernisation, but also between inland and coastal regions and, moreover, between humans and animals (some evokative video-documentaries: Anna Kauber, 2018, Dragos Lumpan, 2017). I'll propose a reflection on past and present narratives (Stefano Di Stefano's La ragion pastorale, 1731) face to the increasing 'heritagization' of pastoralism (Franco Ciampitti's Il tratturo,1968). The often compromised pastoral landscape is evoked, in fact, through narratives, used and textually re-imagined and, at the same time, as a powerful tool for the tourist exploitation and the marketing of the territories (Bindi, 2017). Here the narration about 'routes' - sacred, cultural, naturalistic - becomes a tool for enhancing of cultural landscapes, but, above all, it represents an ambivalent and challenging notion: a radically mobile root and source of identity ( Infold, Way of Walking, 2008; Aime-Viazzo-Allovio, Sapersi muovere, 2001; Petrocelli, La transumanza, 1998).
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores issues of self-identity, belonging and community in literature, commentaries, and real-life encounters at the public library. Its scope is the recent literary surge challenging majority perspectives by young Norwegian authors.
Paper long abstract:
New voices engaged in describing, questioning and enlarging notions of belonging and community have finally conquered the Norwegian literary scene with full force. Recently, several authors exposing and challenging majority perspectives in various ways have won highly prestigious awards and received substantial publicity. The most quoted sentence from the jury's verdict on the debut novel Our Street by political scientist and bureaucrat Zeshan Shakar (b. 1982) stresses how the protagonist "Jamal's way of expressing himself might give many readers a slightly different view of the Norwegian reality." By the publisher, the novel is given the neologism "homestead prose from the satellite town." Similarly, social commentator and feminist Sumaya Jirde Ali (b. 1997) says about her poetry collection Women who Hate Men that she wishes "to kick-start a more nuanced debate about being a young Muslim in Norway." Which she has certainly achieved.
This paper explores expressions of self-identity, belonging and community in Shakar and Ali's work, in the public reception and in encounters with audiences at Meet the author events at public libraries in Oslo. What roles do these literary and real-life voices play in the recreation of belonging and imagined communities? How is art and commentary, literary critique and social debate intertwined in and around these works of fiction? Wherein lies their particular potentiality as cultural catalysts? And finally, how can we as anthropologists best grasp and analyse these processes at the levels of subjectivity, the social and the societal?
Paper short abstract:
The paper reads Müller's works as stemming from a quite particular status, that of constant minority: ethnic - being a German in Romania - political - opposing the communist regime and being allowed to leave the country - and foreign German in Germany and from the constant struggle to belong.
Paper long abstract:
A part of the Swabian community, a German minority from Romania, Müller appears to be constantly challenged by the utmost feeling of inability to integrate. First, her native village displays a cultural life she can hardly fit in. After leaving the village, she finds a world in which, continually surveilled and harassed by the Securitate, the former political police, she becomes a part of a new minority, that of people who do not make the pact of silent obedience to the regime. Deciding to leave the country and settle in Germany, she joins a new kind minority made of those lucky enough to flee communism. What happens basically, her journeys, either pictured by her novels characters or recomposed by her essays, are a constant struggle to escape a reality she cannot cope with. And when finally reaching the destination, she finds herself again in the position of the minority, of Germans from abroad this time. Recomposing this path, her work may be read as a quest to find suitable belonging against the setting of a perpetual minority status showing the inability of staying in a country as ethnic minority, the struggle of moving away, escaping from group of political minority, and finally the torment of settling in back home as member a new kind of minority.
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to explore the configuration of social and self-identity among descendants of Slovenian migrants in Patagonia, Argentina, through literature, in the context of re-identification and comunalization processes of actors of the Slovenian community in Argentina.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to present some preliminary results of my exploration about the configuration and (re)definition of social and self-identity among descendants of Slovenian migrants in Argentina through literature.
In the last decades, some descendants from migrants of three Slovenian migration flows to Argentina (1878-1888; between World Wars; after Second World War) began to publish self-funded books where they usually narrate or represent their families' migration and integration trajectories in Argentina, as well as their own process of adscription to Slovenianess.
I intend to analyse written life stories produced by descendants of the second and third Slovenian migration waves and to explore, from a comparative perspective, the ways in which the descendants represent in autobiographical works their migration stories, identifications, belongings and loyalties. Although the stories are diverse and reflect highly personal views of the authors, I consider them valuable material for ethnographic research, because such non-hegemonic voices are representative of a wider historical significance, the Slovenian migration processes to Argentina.
My hypothesis is that these literary sources are a creative way to negotiate personal and social identities, memories and history, mostly produced in the context of re-identification and comunalization processes of some actors with no adscription continuity to a Slovenian community in Argentina, as a strategy to reaffirm their personal bonds to their Slovenian ancestors and to represent themselves as a part of a Slovenian imagined community in Argentina.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation explores autobiographical narratives by Artist collective Queendom (2008) and social entrepreneur Loveleen Rihel Brenna (2012). Both discuss growing up in Norway in the 1980s and 1990s. Their self-ascribed minority background plays a central role in the self-historicizing texts.
Paper long abstract:
How do authors with ascribed "minority" background articulate notions of self-identity, belonging, and social formations in literature?
In Norway, "second-generation immigrants" bear the status of their immigrant parents. They often experience the "otherness" that can accompany moving, staying, and dwelling in a "new" society. For these authors with minority background, however, Norway is not a new or foreign society, but rather a place that has not adequately understood or imagined its new social formations.
This presentation explores two contemporary autobiographical narratives by female Norwegian authors with multicultural background. Artist collective Queendom's satire entitled Queendom: Oppdrag Norge (2008) and Loveleen Rihel Brenna's personal essay Min annerledeshet, min styrke (2012) discuss growing up in Norway in the 1990s and 1980s respectively. Their self-ascribed minority background plays a central role in these self-historicizing texts, which employ different narrative strategies to articulate notions of self-identity, society, and belonging.
The texts belong to the genre of literature that constitutes "new voices" and contributes to the circulation of new social narratives. Trouillot (1995) argues that stories and narratives illustrate aspects of "dual historicity," as we simultaneously engage in the sociohistorical process and in narrative constructions about that process. Gullestad (1996) shows how narrative processes and self-historicizing, such as in autobiography, can expose values around which the author centres life and stories about life. Drawing on Trouillot and Gullestad, I explore the extent to which such texts contribute to a Norwegian minority discourse about ideals, truth, notions of self-identity, and social formations.