CFP: GSA 2023 conference panel – Representation of race and minority in the works of German exile writers, Montréal (28.2.2023)

Josephina Bierl Discussion

47th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association (GSA)

October 5–8, 2023, Montréal, Canada

Conveners: Josephina Bierl (Lausanne), Robert Leucht (Lausanne)

Call for Papers: Representation of race and minority in the works of German exile writers

As early as 1927, in his essay Juden auf Wanderschaft, Joseph Roth (1894–1939) explicitly addresses the problem of racism in the United States. In the US, Roth maintains, there are “noch jüdischere Juden, nämlich Neger. Dort ist ein Jude zwar ein Jude. Aber er ist in der Hauptsache ein Weißer. Zum erstenmal bietet ihm seine Rasse einen Vorteil.”

Between 1933 and 1945, numerous German-language writers fled the Nazi regime for the US and South America, as well as, in some cases, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. For many of these involuntary emigrants from the Third Reich, arrival in their countries of exile also inevitably meant being confronted with difference, whether cultural, linguistic, or indeed ethnic. This experience is reflected variously in the literary work of these writers. Roth’s 1927 essay is an early literary reflection on images of self and other on the basis of ethnic difference. It also takes on the latent racism and institutionalized discrimination encountered in their host countries by refugees from Nazism, which they would reflect upon in their writing. Ulrich Becher (1910–1990), for instance, half a generation younger than Roth, shows a particular sensibility for the living conditions of the various ethnic communities in Brazil. Becher’s work, which integrates elements of Afro-Brazilian culture such as samba, carnival, and macumba, exposes the problems Brazilian society faced during the 1940s. Becher thus contributed to shaping an image of Brazil much more realistic than that evoked by Stefan Zweig in his well-known Brasilien. Ein Land der ZukunftFrom an even younger generation of émigrés, Ruth Klüger (1931–2020) survived the Nazi camps and came to the US in 1947. In her autobiography weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1994) Klüger also discusses problems of ethnic minorities, in the process talking explicitly about the privileges enjoyed by white men: “[i]n den späten vierziger Jahren […] jeder mit etwas Unternehmergeist hochkommen, solange dieser Jeder ein Mann von weißer Hautfarbe war.

This panel will consider German-language émigré writers from Nazi Germany whose literary work addresses the concerns of the minority groups living in their countries of exile. Their writing is to be studied for reflections on issues of ‘race’, ‘minority’, ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness’, as well as for the role these issues play there in constituting images of self and other. In order to address these and related questions, we welcome approaches derived from exile studies and inspired by the debates on transcultural as well as postcolonial literary studies. Such approaches should take into consideration the transnational, transcultural, and translingual lives of these émigrés as well as focusing explicitly on how their production of self-images and images of the other is based on the authors’ experience of cultural and racial difference.

We are looking for papers that examine:

  • How the question of race is interrogated in the works of émigrés from National Socialism to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East;
  • How such work addresses the discourse of race in their various countries of exile;
  • The potential for exile literature to question or overcome colonial or racist ideas;
  • Inversely, how exile literature is itself entangled in colonial or racist ideas;
  • Whether the depiction of race differs among the various generations of émigrés, and how; and whether intertextual references can be detected across the generations;
  • Statements of émigrés from Nazi Germany about political conflicts emerging after 1945, such as the Civil Rights Movement or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;
  • Theoretical approaches combining postcolonial and exile studies in order to examine ‘race’ and ‘minority’, ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness’.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief CV by February 28, 2023 to the following email addresses: josephina.bierl@unil.ch, robert.leucht@unil.ch.

Applicants are encouraged to contact the organizers with any questions.

Note: you must be a member of the GSA by March 27, 2023 to submit a proposal for the annual conference. All applicants will be notified by March 7  regarding the status of their proposals.

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Redaktion: Constanze Baum – Lukas Büsse – Mark-Georg Dehrmann – Nils Gelker – Markus Malo – Alexander Nebrig – Johannes Schmidt

Diese Ankündigung wurde von H-GERMANISTIK [Mark-Georg Dehrmann] betreut – editorial-germanistik@mail.h-net.msu.edu

Categories

Keywords