Introduction and Forms of Memoir: Four Case Studies In Movement, Migration, and Transnational Life Writing

Abstract

readers and beholders, thereby opening up new perspectives on, and readings of, reality. To learn about migration and its e ects, not only through the journalistic lens (in news media or online sources), but also through innovative storytelling or visual material, is a chance to see things di erently, to grasp the complexity of these processes, and, thus, to di erentiate more. Drawing on scholars such as Susan Sontag, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Silvia Schultermandl, Katharina Gerund and Anja Mrak, our project argues art's formal attributes can bring us, as readers and viewers, into powerful, transformative experiences that we do not yet know how to name -although these experiences have been labeled as "empathy" by Martha C. Nussbaum, "a ect" by Fredric Jameson, and "agency" by Alfred Gell, for example. 01 Creating proximity and empathy, artistic and literary expressions allow audiences to identify with other peoples' lives, to relate to political events and locations that otherwise appear distant and abstract. This book is one manifestation of a larger, transnational collective of researchers and artists that begins, in one temporality, in 2019, when Jennifer cohosted an international conference titled Forms of Migration: Literature, Performance, the World with Silvia Schultermandl at the University of Graz in Graz, Austria, funded generously by the Austrian Science Fund's (FWF) Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship. Here, she met Stefan Maneval, as well as several of the contributors to this book. A collaboration was born.Stefan proposed the idea of an edited volume on the various aesthetic forms used to give expression to experiences of migration to the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) as part of their Working Group "Common Heritage, Common Challenges" of which he's been a member since 2019. Joining forces with fellow AGYA members Ikram Hili and Matthias Pasdzierny, AGYA kindly supported the publication with a grant. The result is a rich collection of texts and images of various genres and styles, some of which were presented as papers and performances at the 2019 conference in Graz, while others were created for the book by AGYA members, as well as international authors, artists, and researchers.In other temporalities, the story begins elsewhere: in a university in Berlin in the early 1930s…, in Australia's East Hills Migrant Hostel in 1982…, Mosul, Iraq in 1966…, Siena, Italy during the Renais-sance…, in a cookie factory in Bilbao, Spain in 1903…, in a Turkish movie from the 1970s…, in a refugee camp in Lebanon… The story begins before, during, and after colonialism, in California, Poland, Tunisia, Romania, Palestine, Queens… And in one spacetime configuration, the story unfolds on the planet of Memoria.The work collected here showcases the forms of expression that emerge from translocal and transcultural encounters from the perspective of multiple disciplines, including comparative literature, art history, musicology, Middle Eastern and translation studies, as well as artwork, ess...

Migration in Times of Pandemic: Mark Twain’s “3,000 Years Among the Microbes” and the Prospect of Planetary Health

“…45 Stefan Maneval, Jennifer A. Reimer, and Ikram Hili have recently stressed that "[t]o learn about migration and its effects … through innovative storytelling or visual material, is a chance to see things differently, to grasp the complexity of these processes, and, thus, to differentiate more." 46 Especially within the frame of transnational American studies, the many blank spaces of lived migration experiences should move into the center of our interest.…”