Lecture. B. Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Theorizing Unsettlement: Refugee Narratives and Hyperlinked Literary Histories.

Abstract: Drawing on his current book project on refugees and the global novel, in this lecture Mani asks how would our understanding of categories of national, world, or minor literatures change if unsettlement, rather than settlement,  became the keyword for framing our study of literature? Through a discussion of select literary works, the lecture will underscore the significance of a global comparative literary and historical framework in the twenty-first century to undo structures of disciplinary ethno-nationalism.

Speaker: B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German and World Literature and past director of the Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching focus on two interconnected approaches to Migration Studies: migration of human beings in the postcolonial world, and migration of books (Bibliomigrancy) through translation as world literary works. He is the author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham UP, 2017; winner of GSA DAAD Prize MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies) and more recently, as co-editor, A Companion to World Literature (Wiley Blackwell 2020).

Mani has received fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council; the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Grant; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Experienced Researcher Fellowship; the US Department of Education’s Title VI Grant for Center for South Asia; and a DAAD grant for UW’s Center for German and European Studies. He is part of UW-Madison’s “Just Futures” Mellon project on Humanities Education for Anti-Racist Literacy (HEAL). In 2018, he was a residential fellow at ZfL Berlin. Starting AY 2021,he will be a Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity Residential Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison.

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    Meeting ID: 947 2991 0071

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