Conference Report: Im/Mobilities in Times of Transnational Movements: Hispano-African Drama, Poetry, and Narrative, ALA Association (April 2016)

Kira Thurman Discussion

PANEL REPORT: "Im/Mobilities in Times of Transnational Move­ments: Hispano-African Drama, Poetry, and Nar­ra­tive" at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the African Literatures Association (April 2016)

Panel chairs: 
Julia Borst (U of Bremen)
Juliane Tauchnitz (U of Leipzig)

At the 42nd Annual Meeting of the African Literature Association in Atlanta, GA, (April 6-9, 2016), Julia Borst (University of Bremen, Germany) and Juliane Tauchnitz (University of Leipzig, Germany) chaired a panel (sponsored by the Luso/Hispanophone Caucus of the African Literature Association) entitled “Im/Mobilities in Times of Transnational Move­ments: Hispano-African Drama, Poetry, and Nar­ra­tive.” This panel, embracing a field of studies rather neglected by Hispanic and African Literary Studies, advanced ideas from a jointly chaired panel at the 41st Annual Meeting of the African Literature Association in 2015 in Bayreuth, Germany, on “Migratory Movements Towards the European Continent – Different Perspectives in New Spanish and Catalan African Literatures?” In 2015, the panelists Julia Borst, Juliane Tauchnitz and Max Doppelbauer (University of Vienna, Austria) had studied how writers of Equatoguinean and Moroccan origin reflected an experience of migration and diaspora in their writings challenging a bi-dimensional thinking of home and diaspora.

In 2016, the panel’s talks addressed mobility as a basic principle of modernity and a topic related to different forms of in/justice. They aimed at bringing forward the usefulness of this paradigm, widely discussed in social sciences (cf. Ohnmacht et al.; Urry), for literary and cultural studies. To stress the potential and problems of a term like ‘mobility,’ the panel contextualized – or ‘reterritorialized’ – it within a larger debate that included related concepts such as transnationalism or diaspora which – following newer notions – emphasize mobility processes and exchange (cf. Bauböck/Faist).

Moreover, the talks broadened the focus on mobility and took into consideration the ambiguity of this paradigm in a modern/colonial world embracing questions of both mobility and immobility related to asymmetrical, hegemonic and partially ‘racialized’ power positions that intersected with constructed categories of difference (cf. Nicholson and Sheller) – an aspect that tends to be neglected in research on both mobility (cf. Ferry and Sheller) and diasporic and transnational movements. The individual talks therefore traced issues of freedom of movement vs. restrictions on mobility and forced im/mobility in the context of mi­gra­tion and refugee movements in the 20th and 21st centuries in Hispano-African drama, poetry, and narrative with a particular focus on the rarely studied fields of Hispano-Morrocan, Saharaui and Afro-Spanish literary productions.

In her talk “Being Im/Mobile: Migrant Characters in Afro-Spanish Narratives,” Julia Borst examined Equatoguinean texts by Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo and César Mba Abogo. She argued that many narratives written by authors of African origins who live in the diaspora in Spain deal with the experience of migration and of living in a European society that mar­gin­al­izes and homogenizes migrants as the ‘African Other.’ With respect to the topic, they tie in with the tele­vi­sion pictures of illegal refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea that have char­ac­terized an ongoing debate of African migration to Europe in Western societies and media and continue to do so in the context of the current ‘refugee crisis.’

However, she showed that many Afro-Spanish narratives do not reproduce those discourses but write back to them by offering a more complex vision of African migration to Europe that are neither to be reduced to clandestinity nor to decisions of free will to seek a better life elsewhere. Instead, they raise issues of mobility in/justice and forced im/mobilities related to he­ge­monic power relations, coloniality and ‘race.’ As Borst argued, these Afro-Spanish narratives chal­lenge and complexify the picture of the ‘mobile’ border-crossing migrant by pointing to in­sur­mountable obstacles and uncrossable boundaries during and after migration. She elaborated how short stories from Mba Abogos El porteador de Marlow. Canción negra sin color and Ndongo-Bidyogo’s novel El metro enact the migrant as a ‘border crosser’ in a literal and symbolic sense whose mo­bility is, however, at the same time restricted and/or inhibited for she or he is subject to an isolating process of ‘Othering’ and epistemic subalternization that discursively con­fines her or him to the margins of Spanish society.

Juliane Tauchnitz’s talk “The Challenge of the Strait. From the Migratory Drama in the Mediterranean to the Hispano-Maghrebian Dramatic Text” focused on Hispano-Morrocan writer Abdelkader Benabdellatif’s theater play El reto del Estrecho (The challenge of the Strait). Samir and Omar, the only characters who have names in this play, intend to cross the Strait of Gibraltar to reach Spain – a country, as Tauchnitz argued, that they did not perceive as an illusionary Promised Land, but as an exclusive chance to ameliorate their life conditions. All the others who share Samir’s and Omar’s tragic situation, however, do not have names and are condemned to stay anonymous, exchangeable figures representing those clandestine refugees who arrive daily at the Southern coasts of what seems to turn into a European fortress.

Tauchnitz showed that the two protagonists are mobile in many ways: physically, psychologically, metaphorically, emotionally. They are forced into a migration that could be described in terms of a diasporic movement where the old questions of homeland and hostland (in the full ambiguity of its meanings) are not crucial anymore. Instead the focus lies on the act of moving itself. Furthermore, in her talk she examined the creative and innovative potential as well as the restrictions of the dramatic genre to perceive and present such a complex situation of oscillatory passages. Taking into account the didactic impetus of this text, she analyzed how literature could engage in the sociocultural and geopolitical (discursive) ‘mobility turn.’

M’bare Ngom from Morgan State University, USA, examined the representation(s) of identities within the space of displacement in North African literature of Spanish expression in his talk on “Transterritoriality and the Construction of Identity in North African Literature in Spanish.” The specific focus of this paper was the literary creation of Saharawi authors such as Sukina Aali-Taleb, Liman Boicha, Zahara El Hasnaoui, as well as other North African writers, including Abderrahman El Fathi (Morocco) or Ridha Mami, among others.

Ngom emphasized that the literary production of these African cultural practitioners who write in Spanish explores transnationality and territoriality through what Jean-Philippe Dedieu (2012) called “la parole immigrée,” but that Ngom described as “la parole migrante” or “la parole en déplacement.” According to the scholar, this is a discourse that narrates, from different literary platforms, the experience of displacement across/through different space(s) in search of a place; place being a destination and a location turned into a site of multiple negotiations and where identity is subjected to dynamic and constant reinterpretation. Place, he argued, therefore becomes a location and the site of a new community mediated by a variety of interactions, including social responsibility and identity geared to construct dynamic  extra territorial  communities.

In her talk on “Walls, Borders, and Fences in Hispano–Saharawi Creative Expression” Dorothy Odartey-Wellington from the University of Guelph, Canada, also dealt with the rarely studied field of Hispano-Saharawi Creative Expression. She elaborated that the intensified movement of persons, knowledge and goods in our 21st century due to digital technology, access to the means of travel and capital, as well as the dissolution of some age-old state boundaries, created a false sense of the steady disappearance of many impediments to human mobility.

She discussed that this apparent world without borders, however, obscures the existence, and the ongoing erection, of walls and similar physical barriers to the unencumbered flow of people and ideas across real and imagined boundaries. Accordingly, Odartey-Wellington explained that the so-called “wall of shame” that slithers some 2,700 km south from Morocco and ends in the southeastern corner of the Western Sahara is such a wall; it was built by Morocco between 1980 and 1987 to inscribe its dominion over the Western Sahara in the sand. As with any physical barrier that is erected to exclude, dehumanize and/or annihilate, the Moroccan “wall of shame”, according to Odartey-Wellington, also, paradoxically, incites the creation of alternative boundaries within whose lines communities emerge to re-imagine their identity and their sense of sovereignty.

Using theories emerging from the cultural and narrative perspectives of border studies, Odartey-Wellington explored the representations of physical barriers as sites of aesthetic production in Saharawi creative expression, focusing primarily on the work of Saharawi writers who draw their own line in the sand through the use of Spanish as their language of communication, creation and activism.

The panels’ results will be published in a Research in African Literatures special issue on “Diasporic Passages between Europe and Africa. Transcultural Movements in New Spanish and Catalan African Literatures” (forthcoming in 2017).

 

WORKS CITED

Bauböck, Rainer/Faist, Thomas (eds.) (2010). Diaspora and Transnationalism. Concepts, Theory and Methods. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Dedieu, Jean-Philippe Dedieu (2012). La parole immigrée. Les migrants africains dans l’espace public en France (1960-1995). Paris : Klincksiek.

Ferry, Allison/Sheller, Mimi (2014). "Mimi Sheller: Mobility Justice", in: What is Mobilities? 8:1. Web [22 Oct 2015].

Nicholson, Judith/Sheller, Mimi (2016). „Race and the Politics of Mobility. Introduction“, in: Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 6:1, pp. 4-11.

Ohnmacht, Timo/Maksim, Hanja/Bergmann, Manfred Max (2009). „Mobilities and Inequality. Making Connections,“ in: Eds. id. Mobilities and Inequality. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 7-25.

Urry, John (2007): Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.