Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing

INSTITUTE OF MODERN LANGUAGES RESEARCH

School of Advanced Study • University of London

Precarious Homes Reading Group

Friday 16 & 23 April 2021, 15:00-16:00 BST (Online)
Organisers: Annette Bühler-Dietrich (Stuttgart) and Maria Roca Lizarazu (Birmingham)

In this first bloc of events on “Precarious Homes”, organised as a Reading Group, we will consider questions of home-making in settings that appear antithetical to the very notion of home: displacement, statelessness and the environment of the camp.

Recent research in the realm of sociology suggests that camps can produce their own forms of political membership (see Sigona on “campzenship”, 2013). One question that will interest us therefore relates to what – if any – forms of belonging, membership and home-making are possible in settings of displacement and encampment and what corresponding forms of agency might be imaginable particularly, but not solely, in the realm of the arts.

Precarious Homes 1, 16 April 2021, 15:00-16:00 BST

Register here to receive the online joining link: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/24069

In this first session, we will discuss Sulaiman Addonia’s 2018 novel Silence is My Mother Tongue. Addonia’s novel talks of the siblings Saba and Hagos who live in a makeshift refugee camp which comes to establish its own laws and ways of live. It discusses freedoms and constraints related to gender, sexuality and muteness, since Hagos cannot speak and only gradually learns to write. Composed of short chapters and different voices, the novel finds a form and a poetics to capture the extraordinary state of camp life between social surveillance, hope and kernels of possibilities.

Essential Reading for 16 April
Sulaiman Addonia, Silence is My Mother Tongue (London: Indigo Press, 2018)

Further Reading (for both sessions)
Sigona, Nando, ‘Campzenship: Reimagining the Camp as a Social and Political Space’, Citizenship Studies, 19.1 (2015), 1–15.
Lyndsey Stonebridge, Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Precarious Homes 2, 23 April 2021, 15:00-16:00 BST

Register here to receive the online joining link: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/24068

For the second session, we will read Hannah Arendt’s famous essay “We Refugees” alongside Giorgio Agamben’s response to Arendt in his short essay “Beyond Human Rights”. Both Arendt and Agamben argue that the figure of the refugee necessitates a re-thinking of established notions of citizenship and sovereignty.

Essential Reading for 23 April
Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, available online here: https://www.jus.uio.no/smr/om/aktuelt/arrangementer/2015/arendt-we-refugees.pdf
Giorgio Agamben, ‘Beyond Human Rights’, in: P. Virno and M. Hardt, eds. Radical Politics in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), available online here: https://novact.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Beyond-Human-Rights-by-Giorgio-Agamben.pdf

Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing

Institute of Modern Languages Research

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