Parallel panels, session 3

The debut novel Homegoing (2016) by Ghanaian American writer Yaa Gyasi follows six generations of Ghanaian and African American descendants of two half-sisters born to an Asante women named Maame in the territory of today’s Ghana in the eighteenth century. While one of the sisters and her descendants remain in West Africa, the other is captured, shipped to North America, and enslaved. The two family branches reunite when the African American descendant Marcus and the Ghanaian descendant and second-generation US immigrant Marjorie meet in the late twentieth-century United States. Covering three centuries and two family branches across the Atlantic, the historical novel reflects genealogies of Blackness through the trope of the family and its perpetual quest for escape, refuge, homegoing, and homemaking in the face of enslavement, (post)colonialism, migration, imprisonment, and poverty on both sides of the Atlantic. Homegoing brings together discourses around slavery and recent migration across the Atlantic between Africa south of the Sahara and the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that until recently have been received “as two distinct stories” and together challenge “expected ways of narrating both America and Africa” (Goyal, Runaway Genres chap. 5). Due to this complex transnational and diasporic disposition, Homegoing negotiates past and present concepts of Blackness and the anti-blackness that both African Americans and Black migrants face without distinction in the United States and elsewhere (cf. Sexton, “People-of-Color Blindness” 53).

Drawing on recent Afro-pessimist and Black feminist critical interventions, this paper analyzes how Homegoing rethinks these concepts in the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman, Lose Your Mother 6). As Marjorie is told: “Here, in this country [the US], it doesn’t matter where you came from first to the white people running things. You’re here now, and here black is black is black” (Gyasi 273).

Paula von Gleich is a researcher and lecturer of North American Literature at the department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, University of Bremen, Germany. She is executive director of the Bremen Institute of Canada and Québec Studies and co-editor of the journal Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies. In 2020, von Gleich submitted her dissertation “The Black Border and Fugitive Narration in Black American Literature” which analyzes concepts of fugitivity and captivity in Black North American narratives and Black feminist and Afro-pessimist theory. A past recipient of a Bridge scholarship (U of Bremen 2014) and a doctoral fellowship (Evangelisches Studienwerk 2015-2017), she also managed the office of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries (2017-2019) and was visiting scholar in residence at the Barnard Center for Research on Women at Barnard College and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University in fall 2016.

This paper examines the way in which two contemporary Caribbean writers, Earl Lovelace and Robert Antoni, draw upon the colonial history and (neo)colonial concepts of technology to interrogate race, identity, culture and literature in the globalized, neoimperialist present of the Caribbean.

In his 2011 novel Is Just a Movie, Earl Lovelace offers a bitter satire of neoliberal and neoimperialist “development” politics and the promise of technology as a cure for history and as inaugurating its end. In contrast to such imported high tech “solutions” to Trinidad’s social and economic problems, the novel offers a utopian vision of carnival as a technology of personal, cultural and social transformation and thus as an engine of futurity. Robert Antoni’s work has offered an increasingly complicated interrogation of race and Caribbean identity, suspicious of calls for a transcendent or redemptive hybridity (Smith). This has taken place via a succession of technological innovations and interventions in the traditional literary and printed form of the novel, from mirrored or breakable plastic inserts in printed books to the companion website created for his 2013 novel As Flies to Whatless Boys. This historical novel of technological utopianism and colonial settlement (about the inventor John Adolphus Etzler and the Tropical Emigration Society) has commonly been described as a multimedia hybrid or a hypertext (Matas). In Antoni’s own view, however, the purpose of the website is to enable access to additional texts “without interrupting the flow of the narrative” (120-21). That is, digital technologies are employed to enable non-linear reading practices whilst also preserving access to a traditional literary aesthetic. This draws attention to the West Indian novel as itself a key technology of race and identity in the Caribbean, and demands a critical appraisal of the place and use of this technology to imagine Caribbean futures in a world of globalized culture.

Gigi Adair is a junior professor at the University of Bielefeld who specializes in Caribbean, African and British literature, postcolonial studies and gender studies. Her first book, Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: writing diaspora relations, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2019. In addition to her interest in technology, subjectivity and the social, she is currently working on migration literature, time and futurity.

In my paper I will examine intersection of race and gender in a largely and unjustifiably neglected text – Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy (1881), a novel often labelled as a ‘feminist utopia’, for example in the edited version published in 2000 by Syracuse UP. As I will argue in my paper, however, this feminist utopian phantasy, which chronicles the travel of the protagonist Vera Zarovitch to a country devoid of men and entirely based on matriarchal structures, is enabled by a concomitant glorification of racial purity, meaning in this case, that all Mizoran women are equally tall, blonde and blue-eyed. I will first set the scene for my reading of Mizora by outlining the scientific debates which are reflected in the novel, debates which ultimately can be traced back to Darwin’s paradigm-changing theory of adaptation through natural selection. With reference to contemporary writers such as Eliza Burt Gamble, Francis Swiney and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (whose novel Herland clearly shows the influence of Mizora), I will demonstrate how Darwin’s ideas – or, to be more precise, certain readings of them – facilitated biological claims for female superiority, a proto-feminist dream which ostensibly finds its fulfilment in the all-female society of Mizora. At the same time, however, the notion of biological evolution as ‘survival of the fittest’ (H. Spencer) also expediated notions of an inter-racial struggle for existence, which, in the name of spreading civilization, not only sought to justify British colonial expansion but also eventual laid the foundation for the idea that procreation should only be allowed to individuals or groups that could be said to bring humanity as a whole closer to its presumed perfection. In the light of these seemingly disparate but ultimately inextricable scientific discourses and availing myself of Angelique Richardson’s concept of ‘eugenic feminism’ (2001), I will read Mizora as a utopian thought experiment which gives evidence of both the promise for social and political change inherent in Darwinian evolution but also of the concomitant racism and threat to differentiation that potentially accompany such changes.

Wolfgang Funk is currently Assistant Professor (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. He studied English, German and History at Universität Regensburg and has taught at Regensburg, Hanover and Leipzig. He is currently working on a post-doc project on late Victorian women poets and their use of evolutionary imagery. His other current research interests include the New Formalism, the representation of artificial intelligence, questions of authenticity in contemporary fiction as well as fictional representations of Brexit. He has published articles on Bryony Lavery (2007), Jasper Fforde (2010), Martin McDonagh (2010), Dave Eggers (2011), Jez Butterworth (2011), Hilary Mantel (2013), Peter the Wild Boy (2015), May Kendall (2015), Max Müller (2016) and Louisa Sarah Bevington (2017). He is the co-editor of Fiktionen von Wirklichkeit: Authentizität zwischen Materialität und Konstruktion (2011) and The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real (2012). His Ph.D. thesis “The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium” was published with Bloomsbury in 2015 and has been awarded the ESSE First Book Award in 2016. He is also the author of an introduction to Gender Studies (in German; utb, 2018).

This paper attempts to clarify the impact of technology on postcolonial science fiction. It concentrates on the pessimistic and fearful influence that technology has or may have on humanity and shows how technology can be used to enslave and handcuff people and threaten their existence by making them live in catastrophic conditions. The study also shows how the fearful merging between the artificial (technology) and the real (human) leads to a change in the traditional notion of how humanity is defined and how dehumanization took place through technological development. The paper examines Margaret Atwood’s novel, Oryx and Crake (2003), the first part of Atwood’s MaddAddm trilogy, which is written during the postmodern age. The novel presents not only the problem of biotechnology but a post-apocalyptic landscape where humanity has been destroyed and ruined by the dissemination of a man-made virus, referred to in the narrative as the “flood.” The selected novel shows how Atwood changes her ideas and expresses her fears toward the abnormal progress of technology and science and draws through her novel a near-futuristic world in which the use of technology leads to catastrophic results and threatens the human existence on earth. The paper raises a central question of how do postcolonial science fiction writers like Atwood who are anxious about technological developments make their fictional worlds so vividly bleak that readers are instilled with the legitimate fear that the evil of the pages will spill out into reality? To explore this, the study focuses on the illusionary utopia and its dwellers – the downtrodden proletariat man/woman created by scientists. The conclusion sums up the findings of the study.

Dr. Haydar Jabr Koban is an Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Comparative Literature. His PhD dissertation title: Literary Representation of Environmentalism: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Study in Selected Global South novels. He is currently a faculty member of Al-Ma’moun College University, Baghdad – Iraq. He has lectured in many local and international institutions and has written several articles. He is a specialist in Postcolonial literature in the Arab Middle East and the representation of the Arab world in Western literature and media. His research interests directly relate to the rights of marginalized minorities, migration and Diaspora, women’s studies, violence, and terror, resistance and survival, histories and memorization, and other pertinent debates. Besides the academic career, He is a simultaneous interpreter with excellent experience in interpretation, a poet and novelist. He has a published volume of poetry (An Offering of Peace) and a novel in the process of text editing.

The concept of the “other” has a significant resonance in postcolonial discourse for the reason that, as Hasan Al-Saidi ironically puts it, “an imperialist must see the Other as different from the Self; and therefore he has to maintain sufficient identity with the Other to valorize control over it” (Al-Saidi 95). Thus, it can be argued that the other is the result of the estrangement of the self from the one who is different, alien and unknown, in order to gain certain authority over it. However, with the technological improvements and scientific innovations, the line between “the other” and “the self” has become blurry and ominous. In his novel Never Let Me Go (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro depicts the life of human clone students. Due to the fact that these students are not born from a human female womb, they are not considered as human beings, though, they are ‘uncannily’ similar to the humans (“self”). This uncanny similarity is threatening for the humans because it is the human who is, as Tony Davies notes, “always singular, always in the present tense, […] inhabit[ing] not a time or a place but a condition, timeless and unrealised”. Therefore, these uncanny clones are threatening the humans’ perception and belief in the individual’s singularity. Due to fear of the clones they are kept in a glass prison by an invisible hand.

This paper will focus on the question of how Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go portrays the fear of the other and how it illustrates the issue of the self and the other in the framework of postcolonial theory and science fiction. Furthermore, this paper will shed light on how “Western” scientific methods and their knowledge production methods are morally ambiguous.

Hasan Serkan Demir is an English Literature PhD student at Chemnitz University of Technology. He graduated from Celal Bayar University English Department BA program and Dokuz Eylül University American Culture and Literature MA program with his thesis: “Poesque Space as a fear factor in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go”. Currently, he is working on his PhD project: “In Search of Identity: The Illusional and Metaphorical Detective in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels”.

Conceptions of genetic kinship have recently emerged as a powerful new discourse through which to trace and imagine connections between individuals and communities around the globe. This paper argues that, as a new way to think and represent such connections, genetic discourses of relatedness constitute a new poetics of kinship. Discussing two exemplary postcolonial narratives, Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), this paper argues further that literary fiction, and postcolonial literary fiction in particular, is uniquely positioned to critically engage this new biomedical discourse of global and interpersonal relations. Ghosh’s and Smith’s novels illuminate and amplify the concept of a cultural poetics of genetic kinship by aesthetically transcending the limits of genetic science to construct additional genetic connections between the West and the Global South on the level of metaphor and analogy. As both novels oscillate spatially between the West and a postcolonial Indian subcontinent, the texts’ representations of literal and figurative genetic relations become a vehicle through which the novels test and re-configure postcolonial identities as well as confront Western genetic science with alternative forms of knowledge. The emerging genetic imaginary highlights – evoking recent sociological and anthropological work – that meaningful kinship relations rely on biological as much as on cultural discourses and interpretations, especially in postcolonial and migrant contexts where genetic markers become charged with conflicting notions of connection and otherness.

Paul Hamann-Rose is a research associate at the Department of English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. While pursuing an ongoing research focus on the history of literary engagements with genetics and proto-genetics, he is currently finalising a monograph on the genetic renegotiation of life itself in the contemporary novel. His publications include an article on genetic privacy in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy in The Journal of Literature and Science (2019) as well as a chapter on “Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman” in Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, edited by Julia Hoydis and Nina Engelhardt (2019)

At the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, when the prospect of a vaccine was remote, a rare space became available for mainstream discussions of ‘alternative science’ – particularly alternatives to ‘western’ allopathic medicine. This was visibly evident in the Sri Lankan context where practices ranging from ritual Buddhist chanting to indigenous syrups were promoted with much vigour. Some practices even received state endorsement. In many instances these ‘alternative’ discourses were framed in anti-colonial terms – as responses to an old but still keenly felt colonial injury. However, the emergence of these alternative scientific discourses also signaled a more insidious dimension to this celebration of indigeneity. On one hand members of a politically powerful professional body representing state allopathic medical doctors claimed ownership over this discourse – as ‘scientific and rational’ interpreters of indigenous knowledge. On the other, charlatan healers emerged with various concoctions for which certain medical professionals and politicians attempted to provide legitimacy – an attempt that failed spectacularly when the ‘true’ credentials of these charlatan healers were revealed. In both these instances – of allopathic doctors becoming custodians of indigenous knowledge and the promotion of charlatans – the ‘real’ casualty was what one might call ‘legitimate’ alternative medicine. The sudden eruption of these discourses of ‘alternative science’ in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic – and the narrowly framed ‘patriotism’ that drove these discourses – underscores a number of tensions and complexities that inform such discourses of indigeneity in post-colonial societies. This paper uses the current context in Sri Lanka to explore the historical forces that shape such discourses of indigeneity and critically interrogates the role nationalist politics plays within such discourses. Thereby, it also cautions against an uncritical fetishization of indigenous knowledge and instead argues for a more critically and historically situated dialogue about how such ‘indigenous’ knowledges can be understood and positioned in contemporary society.

Harshana Rambukwella is Director of the Postgraduate Institute of English at the Open University of Sri Lanka. He received his PhD from the University of Hong Kong, where he is Honorary Assistant Professor at the School of English. He is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (2018). He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Social Studies and Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh and has held a guest professorship at the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg.

My contribution will offer a reading Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) as a ‘postcolonial science novel’. Set in early 1990s Sri Lanka, a country in the midst of an apparently interminable civil war, the novel’s central characters become involved in a scientific investigation which takes them through very different areas of culture all linked through the ongoing political violence. Analysing character constellations, plot structures and narrative perspectives, my contribution will trace the ways in which the novel employs this pattern of a detection narrative, in order to rehearse dimensions of what Aihwa Ong has called “Euroamerican cosmopolitan science”. In the process, the novels takes its readers on an exploration of alternative conceptions, both to and of ‘cosmopolitan science’ – engaging with, but also going beyond, scientific projects of Sinhala cultural nationalism. By highlighting and maintaining the spectrum of alternatives, rather than resolving the problematic tension between them, I argue that the novel can become a unique tool for enabling critical as well as constructive engagements with the (self-)images and (self-)projections of science, which operate in shaping the ‘global assemblage of science’ (Collier/Ong) as well as its various cultural perceptions.

Anton Kirchhofer is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oldenburg. He specialises in Anglophone literature with a particular focus on narrative fiction, as well as on the media and the cultural settings and discursive environment of literature. He is co-director of the Fiction Meets Science research group at Oldenburg and Bremen, funded by the VolkswagenFoundation. In this context he has led research projects on scientist characters in contemporary fiction, and on the reception of contemporary science novels in literary and ‘scientific’ reviews, the results appearing in various journals and essay collections. His current research within Fiction Meets Science is connected to projects on “The Anglophone Science Novel and the Global Dimensions of Science”. With John Holmes and Janine Rogers, Kirchhofer is joint series editor of Explorations in Science and Literature published by Bloomsbury Academic.

Prehistoric and tribal cultures became frequently discussed topics of the Hungarian labour unions’ seminars between the two world wars. Lecturers introduced their audience to the anthropology of prehistoric man, tribal art, Darwinism and Freud’s totem and Taboo.

In this talk, I attempt to shed some light on the janus-faced nature of these seminars and I discuss the role of primitivism in socialist science education with Soma Braun in focus, who published his book (entitled Primitive cultures) on prehistory and tribal culture in 1923.

He intended it as a general educational reading for workers and discussed several aspects of prehistory and tribal culture over 250 pages. As a progressive socialist author, Braun claimed that no biological difference between modern and tribal people could be noted, he recognised women’s oppression as a structural problem and argued that solidarity could transgress the etno-nationalist models, but he also advocated an essentialist theory of social history where labour had become the single measure of value in human society. For Braun, as well as for other socialist authors, anthropology served as a tool to find plausible model-societies outside of the capitalist world to exemplify the ideal workers’ collectives, therefore discussions on the “primitive other” played a key role in the workers’ movement’s own self-definition process and this theoretic discourse did not remain isolated from the workers themselves. It influenced a generation of socialist educators, theatre practitioners and Esperantists. The socialist representations of the imagined “other” both contained regressive and innovative aspects; they provided an opportunity for progressive authors to tackle such issues as human rights violations and racial inequality but the discourse was also always linked to a process of constant appropriation of non-Western cultural elements which never abandoned general prejudices towards the “other”.

Sára Bagdi graduated in Art History (2018) and Aesthetics (2019) at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. In 2016, she joined the avant-garde research group of the Kassák Museum in Budapest and has been assisting the Museum’s projects since 2019. She is mainly interested in the social concepts behind the modernist and avant-garde cultural movements and in her formulating PhD research she plans to focus on how the Hungarian workers’ movement contributed to both the scientific and the everyday discussions about anthropology and ethnology during the 1920s and the 1930s.

Colonial empires have deployed a vast array of political, scientific, visual and narrative practices to “discover”, classify and dominate those lands both physically and epistemically, often labelling them as “remote”, “backwards”, exotic yet pristine. Since the late nineteenth century, the boundaries between exoticism and alleged scientific purposes in Africa became even more blurred in the pictures and films shot by the European filmmakers, who crafted footage instrumental to colonizers’ gaze and desires. Images and narratives about the untameable and dangerous flora and fauna, Big Game-hunting and Safari played a crucial role within colonial discourses. In the aftermath of imperialism, such symbols of dominance have been transformed into symbols of conservationism, which may still reflect the priorities imposed by Western powers to dominate the (former) colonial world geographically, economically as well as epistemically. Although ethnographic documentaries or travelogues focusing on the exotic encounter with “different” cultures have been largely studied in major colonial and postcolonial experiences, no thorough studies have been devoted so far to these visual products within the Italian context.

Against this background, our paper aims to offer a first delve into the relationship between reportage, “objective” knowledge of Africa and (post)colonial legacies in modern and contemporary Italian popular culture. Drawing on Maria Joao Castro’s standpoint, according to which “tourism is the final stage of colonialism”, our aim is to highlight the continuities between colonial documentaries on Africa’s flora and fauna and postcolonial films dealing with travelogue, Safari and Tourist attractions. The focus will be on two documentaries set in Eritrea produced in the late 50s and 60 and showing local traditions and pristine landscapes, and on a TV travel shows (Alle falde del Kilimangiaro, Geo&Geo) of early 2000s. Though different in format and purposes, both case studies provided no reference to the former colonial past; both, instead, use visual and discursive tropes reiterating an ambiguous form of epistemic control over African culture, strengthening the self-declared rationality of the European gaze and its cultural (and racial) diversity, creating an idolized notion of Africa and entailing the fetishization of African wildlife.

Beatrice Falcucci (Ph.D candidate, University of Florence) is a Ph.D candidate in History of Science at the University of Florence. Her research focuses on colonial collections in Italian Natural History museums and fascist colonialism’s relationship with science.

Gianmarco Mancosu (Ph.D, University of Cagliari; Ph.D, University of Warwick) is postdoctoral researcher in Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cagliari. His research centres on histories and memories of Italian colonialism and decolonization.

This thesis is concerned with the intersections of two global phenomena: yoga and Social Media. Yoga today is a hybridized bodily and embodied practice developed from a variety of religious, philosophical, and socio-political influences that has made its way from counter-cultural practice to the heart of pop culture with a heightened presence especially on Social Media. What yoga is understood to be, what it looks like and whom it is for is strongly mediated by globally circulating images as can be found on platforms like Instagram. Arjun Appadurai’s concept of scapes and global flows accounts for the global dispersal of images and imaginations about yoga on this platform. Critical engagement with his thoughts draws attention to the impediments of such visual flows based on the technological underpinnings of Social Media platforms, replicating power relations of the analogous world. Ilan Kapoor’s view of Lacanian psychoanalysis adds an understanding of how drives and desire offer a breeding ground for constant consumption but also open up room to interrogate how the consumption of certain images represent our libidinal investments in prevailing power relations by asking questions like Who is it we see? How are they depicted? Whom do we not see? Why? Relying on the psychoanalytical concepts of desire, drive and gaze, the thesis seeks to offer answers to these questions in following W.J.T. Mitchell’s understanding of pictures as “active players” in the establishment and disruption of values (Mitchell 2005: 105) while at the same time consolidating the persistence of certain visual representations and modes of seeing with regard to representations of yoga on Instagram that are “deeply involved with human societies, with the ethics and politics, aesthetics and epistemology of seeing and being seen” (337-338).

Stefanie Kemmerer has studied Culture and Economy with a focus on Spanish Studies at the Universities of Mannheim and Alcalá de Henares. In her previous research she investigated representations of violence and power in the work of Spanish author Julio Llamazares. She has studied Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht and is a member of Goethe University Frankfurt, where she is enrolled in the M.A. Moving Cultures – Transcultural Encounters programme. She is currently working on her master thesis titled Yogascapes – The Visual Politics of Yoga as seen on Instagram.