Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies (Funded by Warwick's Humanities Research Centre)
Wednesday 29 October, 16:00 in H202, Humanities Building, Warwick University Campus
Future histories? The politics of time as duration in German-language diasporic literature.
Dr Kate Roy (IMLR)
This paper explores ideas of ‘duration’ in practice in German-language narrations of Other pasts by Emine Sevgi Özdamar ('Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei', 1992), Mariam Kühsel-Hussaini ('Gott I'm Reiskorn', 2010) and Navid Kermani ('Dein Name', 2011), focusing especially on the effect of distinct understandings of duration on challenging or upholding the ‘two worlds’ dichotomy. In each case, I seek to unravel how duration intertwines these ‘Other’ pasts with the German (and global) present – or how it separates past and present conclusively. In so doing, I explore both the intensive Bergsonian notion of duration, where the past is always already inherent in an ‘actual ever-present “Now”’ that generates the future ‘out of itself’ (Iqbal), and extensive ideas of duration in its (Orientalist) ‘enduring’ sense, where notions of antiquity play up ‘distance and difference’ (Said). My interest in exploring the radically different readings of duration that these German-language texts call forth is in these readings’ illumination of the texts’ respective ‘politics of the private’. Exploring the coexistence of past and present in these texts thus, I ask whether they enable us to move beyond the idea of reading the apparently (auto)biographical as an ‘auto-ethnography’ (Seyhan), or indeed beyond notions of ‘intact’ cultures in dialogue. Does ‘retrieving’ from these pasts resurfacing in the (German) present have the potential, as Naveeda Khan’s 2012 reading of Bergson suggests, to fashion a response to the world that ‘could introduce newness into [it]’, and indeed shape it anew.
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