Presenter Bios & Abstracts

Panel 1, “Narrating Difference”: 

Veronika Muskheli (University of Washington)- Radiant Brides: Migration of the Folktale Motif “The Horse as a Magical Helper to the Heroine”
Most folktale types and motifs have worldwide distribution. The questions of whether they have arisen independently in multiple locations or spread from a single source, and in that case, by which mode have been debated by researchers ever since folktale collections have been systematized and indexed in the beginning of the XX century. I observe differences in the geographical distribution of the helper-horse in wonder tales dependent on whether the tales are told from the male or female point of view. In Europe, both East and West, the motif applies only to the male main character—the hero of the tale. In Mongolia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, the motif applies to both the hero and the heroine, from whose point of view the tales are narrated. And in the Russian Far East, remarkably, the motif applies only to the heroine and only to a single tale type. The Russian Far East, until recently, did not know the horse—it was introduced there in the XIX century by Russian colonizers. Therefore, the motif had to migrate to the area. Because folktales necessarily travel with people and because recent studies confirm that males usually do not narrate tales from a female point of view, I suggest that the motif of the woman’s magical helper-horse has migrated to the Far East from its origin somewhere in Mongolia, or Central Asia, or the Caucasus with radiating brides through exogamous patrilocal marriages, gradually moving further and further east with each successive generation.

Veronica Muskheli is a doctoral student in Slavic Languages and Literatures Department. An older scholar and a native Russian speaker, she focuses on female voices in world folktales and in contemporary Russian literature. She is this year’s Alvord Fellow in Humanities at the University of Washington.

Zhe Geng (Harvard University): Metaphors of Disability in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
In recent years, there has been a growth of studies examining the intersection of Disability and Asian American Studies. In this paper, I wish to explore the ways in which disability and illness figure in narratives of migration and immigration, particularly in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976). In his seminal 1987 essay, “Disability as Metaphor in Literature,” Leonard Kriegel attacks the Western literary tradition of metaphorizing disability sparking subsequent resistances to disability as a metaphoric device in literary studies. However in response, scholars have recently reassessed the critical backlash against metaphor and have argued for ethical critical engagement with and reinterpretation of disability metaphors in literature. I propose to engage with this debate and analyze the interstitial space between “real” and “metaphoric” disability in immigrant narratives. I argue that “metaphors” of disability as they appear in The Woman Warrior are not simply misrepresentations of disability nor do they seek to distance the embodied experiences of disabled subjects, but rather the employment of such devices actively probe the boundaries between disabled and non-disabled identities and form an essential part of the exploration and performance of Asian-American identity. I focus on instances of “performed” disability–such as assumptions of silence or illness–as subverting cultural expectations and asserting Otherness and examine disability as resulting from environmental or cultural structures. I also question the “performance” of disability itself. When does “performance” stop being “performance”; when does “performance” become “real”? Metaphors of disability, particularly in expressions of immigrant experiences, can act as grounds of addressing and elucidating individual and collective identities, racial tensions, and cultural displacement.

Zhe Geng is a first year doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her areas of focus are in 19th and 20th century English, American, Chinese, and French literatures and Disability Studies.

Nathan Bates (University of Washington): „Eine Art Vogelfreiheit“: The Arrest of Individuation and Family Narrative through the Poetics of Migration in Zsuzsa Bánk’s Novel Der Schwimmer

The contemporary German author Zsuzsa Bánk’s first novel, Der Schwimmer (2002), tells the story of a broken family suffering from the consequences of a mother’s decision to abandon her family, flee communist Hungary, and migrate to West Germany in the 1950s. Told from the perspective of Kata, the daughter left behind, the narrative gives special attention to the developmental struggles of her younger brother Isti, who attempts to come to terms with his mother’s absence. Kálmán, the children’s father, refuses to talk about the family crisis with his children, isolating himself emotionally from his children. Instead of confronting his problems, Kálmán goes swimming in local lakes or rivers and “dives” into his own thoughts for hours at a time, becoming oblivious to the world around him. With the migration of his mother and the psychological withdrawal of his father, Isti becomes clairaudient, claiming to hear what inanimate objects say and feel. Throughout the novel, Isti is denied the opportunity to either reject or accept this reconstitution of his family, leading him evermore toward supernatural evanescence. More than mere neglect, Isti’s exclusion from some essential forms of individuation during the early formative years of his psychological development, especially his integration into a family narrative, leads to a developmental stalemate which in turn forces the boy onto a path of self-annihilation, making him vogelfrei in every sense of the word.

In this paper, I examine how the poetics of migration are used in this novel to paralyze the interrelation between individuation and family narrative. I explicate the metaphors of swimming and diving in the novel to adumbrate the inhibition to compose oneself into a family narrative and attain individuation. In particular, I read Isti’s story as an inability to name, which arrests the migratory essence of narrative.

Nathan Bates is a native of Washington State. He received both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in German at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT. He wrote his MA thesis on Alfred Döblin’s Berge Meere und Giganten, intertextually analyzing its biblical and mystical themes of apocalypse. His dissertation focuses on how the high modernist German novel (Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, Hermann Broch’s Die Schlafwandler, Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen, and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz) anticipates the transhumanist concept of whole brain emulation (WBE) or mind-uploading. The project examines the main goals of WBE vis-à-vis the literary representation of consciousness. Nathan is interested in questions that gnaw, bite, or scratch at the fantastic and inexplicable in literature.

Panel 2, “Seeking Refuge”:

Ross Lipton (Binghamton University, SUNY) – Irmgard Keun’s Kind Aller Länder and the Contemporary European Refugee

In an age of unprecedented mass immigration and displacement, Irmgard Keun’s understudied Kind Aller Länder, written in 1938, is a prescient work of émigré literature that is ripe for critical reevaluation. The novel, as narrated in the voice of young Kully, details the trials and travails of a Kölsch family as they journey across Europe on the eve of World War Two, fleeing from German occupying forces. While depicting the precarious conditions of the life of political exile, Keun’s novel also functions as a critique of the exclusionary apparatus of the nation-state as manifested in both geographic borders (in the form of guarded check-points, visas and interrogation units) and linguistic difference. As I will discuss in this paper, Keun’s discussion of borders, as filtered through Kully’s naïve yet insightful voice, demystifies the liminal space between nations as a “drama that happens in the middle of a train, with the help of actors who are called border guards.” In a similar way, Kully’s panlinguistic imagination imagines a world in which language is divested from their country of origin, such as the Italian heard at the beach town of Bordighera, which Kully describes as “Berlinian”; Yiddish is confused for Polish and the British English spoken by Kully and her father is ridiculed by New Yorkers.  My presentation will explore the way in which this novel depicts the illusory quality of the nation-states as a mechanism that separates the outsiders from the citizens of the body politic through revealing its innate contradictions. I will discuss this text in relation to the ongoing conversation surrounding the fluctuating state of citizenship in Europe by discussing this novel along with Marc Morjé Howard’s work in order to create a dialogue between Keun’s novel and the current refugee crisis in contemporary Europe.

Ross Lipton is a doctoral student at Binghamton University, SUNY in the Department of Comparative Literature. His recent works include a presentation at the Annual Conference of the Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, University of Lisbon, entitled: “Translational Cities: The Relationship between Language and Architecture” as well as a presentation at the 2014 ACLA conference on memory in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Schwindel.Gefühle.

Chiara Benetollo (Princeton University) – We are the story we tell: migration narratives in asylum law

In court rulings for asylum petitions, the migrants’ narrations are regularly the only evidence at stake. The destiny of many asylum seekers, thus, depends on their ability to tell a story that qualifies them as ‘refugees’ rather than simple ‘migrants’: they are, literally, the story they tell to the court. Individual, unique stories need to align with the standardized framework of a refugee narrative. This process of re-elaboration is performed in the first place by migrants themselves as a response to the questions of public officers, and is then carried on by the judges who re-tell and quote the migrants’ interrogations. Court opinions are the ground in which conflicting narratives are unified and reified in a coherent story that, by re-interpreting the past of its protagonist, shapes her present identity and her future: the subject loses possession of his own story. These texts, however, bear the scars of such a conflict. Inconsistencies, weak passages, hesitations let alternative narratives emerge between the lines. What happens when our story, the foundation of our identity, is reified as a piece of evidence? Which traces does this process leave in the official narrative, delivered through the court opinions? My talk investigates these issues through a close reading of US Supreme Court rulings. I focus on cases that base the asylum petition on claims of sexual violence (in particular, Shoafera vs INS, 2000 and Kebede vs Ashcroft, 2014). The voices of these women oppose the standardized narration of a political or ethnical persecution that is necessary to obtain asylum, challenging the dominant narrative that shapes the lawful definition of a refugee.

Chiara Benetollo is a graduate student at Princeton University (Comparative Literature). She earned her Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. Her main research interests are literature and the law, translation theory, the circulation of French and Russian literature in 20th century Europe.

Panel 3, (Urban Utopias):

Joseph Kuster (University of New Mexico): Free to be You and Me (But Mostly Me): Hybrid Identities and Queer Utopias in My Beautiful Launderette and Lilting

In this paper, I intend to examine the interplay between sexual identity and immigrant identity in two British films: My Beautiful Launderette and Lilting. Specifically, I will interrogate the power hierarchies inherent to multiple identities: how and why certain identities take precedence in and become functions of certain spaces. In My Beautiful Launderette, the main characters create an idealized, utopian space in the launderette, which allows them to freely express their sexual identities. Similarly, Lilting creates a sharply defined binary between the main romantic pair’s apartment and the traditional Chinese mother’s home—clearly delineating closeted vs. open space.

I will also examine both films’ construction of ancestral ‘homeland’ as a traditional, family-oriented structure—one that is only felt in relationships with other family members, rather than any personal connection to the past. This creates a point of tension between modernity and tradition, where queer identity contrasts with tradition and vice versa. I will theorize that both films provide different solutions for addressing the family/sexuality dichotomy. Lilting suggests an idealized return to an imagined home in which tradition and modernity are united under the same roof—an approach that requires the assimilation of its Chinese characters into British society. In contrast, My Beautiful Launderette proposes the compartmentalization of private and public space—a scenario in which identities colonize their own, mutually exclusive spaces. Ultimately, neither film offers a completely positive result for its characters, which suggests that neither Lilting’s romanticized unification of past and present nor My Beautiful Launderette’s cold separation of identities represents an ideal path for addressing queer identity. Rather, both films’ characters falter because of their dependence on structuring queer identity in context of constructed, territorialized spaces.

Joseph Kuster is a German Studies masters candidate at the University of New Mexico. His research interests include the development of queer sexuality in Weimar-era film, subjectivity and memory studies, borders and liminal spaces, and Werner Herzog.

Richard Hronek (University of Wisconsin – Madison): “Plague and the City”

Looking to “the City” for self-fulfillment is a trend in art from the early 20th century and post-­WWI era. With this phenomenon in mind, one can draw parallels between seemingly unrelated texts that enhance the meaning of both. Invariably, traveling to the City means a transition from being at home to being alien, yet characters are still compelled to so do. Such a compulsion is depicted in two disparate works: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens and Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen. Through the course of each story, the protagonists move to the city, suffer from being an outsider (albeit in different ways), and have their ultimate dreams dashed.

The similarities between these two stories demand that the reader ask whether they resemble each other on a deeper level and, indeed, they do. Namely, they both follow the trajectory of what Elana Gomel calls “plague narratives” in her The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body. Both narratives make a mistake, according to Gomel’s article, by thinking that these plagues will lead to a utopia/NewJerusalem. In Nosferatu, this happy ending is explicitly outlined for the city inhabitants; in Mädchen, the protagonist can only acknowledge that her preconceived notions of city life were largely mistaken. Intriguingly, despite the lack of the supernatural in Mädchen, the ending leaves the possibility for much more suffering than in Nosferatu. In showing the similarities between these two works, I hope to establish that the American­ style consumerism from which Berlin and Doris suffer is akin to the plague of Vampirism and Black Death that are washing over Wisborg in Nosferatu.

Biography forthcoming

Panel 4, “Between Identities”:

Erin Gilbert (University of Washington): The Nun Lieutenant and the Cavalry Maiden: Throughout history women have donned traditionally male attire to fight in wars, but Catalina de Erauso and Nadezdha Durova are unique among those ranks. Both forged masculine military identities, wrote about their adventures and exploits with unrepentant relish, and in so doing secured space—and royal support—for themselves in dominant cultures where other women’s lives were circumscribed. La Monja Alferez, or Nun Lieutenant as de Erauso called herself in her eponymous autobiography, fled a convent at the dawn of the 17^th century in Spain and traveled as a man to South America where she became a conquistador. At the dawn of the 19^th century Nadezdha Durova left her husband and son and enlisted in an uhlan regiment as a young man. Her memoir, Cavalry Maid, documents her participation in Russia’s military efforts to repel Napoleon’s forces. These personal narratives illustrate how personal histories unfold simultaneously within and outside of broader historical narratives. De Erauso and Durova defy easy categorization: each transgressed gendered expectations of behavior only to reap rewards for fierce nationalism and adherence to strict martial codes of conduct. They expressed nostalgia for the battlefields where they fought even as they transformed themselves into authors. In spite of the historical and geographic separation between de Erauso and Durova, an investigation of the parallels between their stories offers insight into how narratives of transgression can function within hierarchical structures.

Erin Gilbert holds an MFA in Fiction Writing and Literature from Bennington College and is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema, and Media Studies at the University of Washington. Her scholarly interests include transnational women writers in post-revolutionary Mexico and literature of travel, immigration, and exile.

Lisa Ortiz (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): When I became “your people”: The in-betweenness of (return) migration: How does a Puerto Rican – born in the U.S. and raised on the island – negotiate return migration? How does a woman of color navigate real and imagined terrain among other minorities? How do remnants of colonization and (in)tangible access to citizenship affect individual livelihoods? This performative narrative explores insider-outsider dichotomies that arise among ethnic and racial communities while problematizing notions of privilege. At the core, I argue that (return) migration is the underlying basis that disrupts notions of identity, Latinidad, and citizenship for Puerto Rican return migrants. Even more so, it disrupts notions of unity and solidarities due to larger structural forms of oppression at play, in this case, within the continental United States. In addition to providing contextual understandings of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the US, this piece follows Diversi and Moreira’s (2009) approach of being in-between. It highlights betweeness of cultures, locations, lives “not to fix our identities but to situate ourselves in the socially constructed, fluid space from which we are writing, thinking, and giving meaning to the experiences represented” (p. 19). And while narratives are crucial, in order to be transformative, they must be acted upon, or at the very least, shared. Denzin (2013) argues that “autoethnography is all about standing naked, but also about what to do thereafter.” This work stems from personal experience that resembles the public and political everyday factors that affect people’s lives. I seek to provoke critical self-reflection of our complicities in order to promote socially just change, especially in places that continue to be diversified by increasing migratory patterns.

Lisa Ortiz is a doctoral student in Education Policy, Organization & Leadership with minors in Latina/o, Gender & Women’s, and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on influences of migration at individual and structural level within the context of Puerto Rico.

Panel 5, “Opening Translation”:

Rebecca Loescher (Johns Hopkins University): Productive Unbelonging: Form and the In-Between in Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière

Both Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) and Dany Laferrière’s  L’énigme du retour (2009) are narratives deeply entrenched in the questions of identity and belonging. On the surface, their respective tales might be said to portray the processes of self- and group-identification as driven by the binary logic of inside vs. outside, self vs. other. It is my contention, however, that both texts make productive use of such dichotomous thought-constructs, depicting them in narrative content only to debunk them in narrative mode. As Haitian exilic writers, Danticat and Laferrière imbue their texts with their own experiences of the in-between, suggesting that this intermediary space might serve as a fertile ground for thinking identity in altogether different terms.

To illustrate my argument, I will first discuss Danticat’s text – a fictional account of the 1937 Parsley Massacre –, exploring Edouard Glissant’s notion of single-root identification as impetus behind the genocide as it is depicted in the novel. The importance placed on language, as well as the notions of lineage, memory, and the past as a haunting force will be of central concern here. As segue, I will sketch out the subtler ways Danticat’s text foils the notion of single-root identity, notably thanks to its dual structure, but also via the figure of the main protagonist, who is depicted as most “at home” in the border space between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Turning to Laferrière’s work – an autobiographically-inspired tale of post-exilic return to Port-au-Prince –, I will discuss similar themes of un-belonging. Here, I will focus on metaphoric imagery, temporality, and textual form as illustrative of a conception of duality as caught between two irreconcilable poles. Ultimately, however, these same terms of analysis will elucidate the ways in which Laferrière’s text actually counters this logic, underscoring instead the potentiality of the in-between as a space in which these two poles might coexist, productively.

Rebecca Loescher is a 5^th year graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation explores polyvocality in contemporary literatures in French as illustrative of a shift towards relational thought-constructs. Her published articles include “Apprendre à voir: la place de l’optique dans F. Bon” and “Le toucher chez A. Ernaux.”    

Sara Iacovelli (University of Colorado Boulder): Translation Must Be Endless: The Heterolingual Address as a Tool for Building Language Justice

This paper argues for the usefulness of Naoki Sakai’s theory of the heterolingual address in the framework of language justice, and puts this theory in conversation with the prescriptions put forth by the activist translation collective Antena. While language justice is primarily conceived of as having to do with verbal communication and physical multilingual spaces of access for marginalized language groups, I consider its relationship to and uses for the project of literary translation, wherein the literary text can be seen both as an “address,” following Sakai’s framework, and as a “multilingual space,” following Antena’s. From this perspective, the heterolingual address can serve as a necessary tool for fostering language justice within the realm of literary translation.

The heterolingual address necessitates an acknowledgement of the different languages and language abilities present in an audience, and an understanding that a common language is not a given, and thus that understanding is not a given. Language justice, conceptualized loosely, is an attempt to even the playing field on which different languages and language speakers interact in a globalized world.

The heterolingual address fosters a nonaggregate community in which communication can never be assumed by virtue of the fact that single language dominance can never be assumed. The representative “we” of such a community is not bound by commonality, but is heterogeneous and considered equal. As Sakai paraphrases Jacques Ranciere: “what gathers us together is not commonness among us but a will to communicate despite an acute awareness of how difficult it is.” This is true within as well as across languages. In the heterolingual address, the difficulty of communication is underlined and valued, and repurposed as a powerful tool for the promotion of language justice:  the only way to begin to understand is not to understand.

Biography forthcoming

Lana Jaffe (Harvard University): The Rest is Silence: Language and the Ineffable

Referencing Hamlets’s dying words, George Steiner writes, “[l]anguage can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the larger part, is silence” (Steiner, Language and Silence 21). In After Babel, Steiner contends that every single act of communication is inherently a translation as soon as it passes from one person to another (Steiner, After Babel 67). Nathacha Appanah in her novel Le dernier frère and Soeuf Elbadawi in his poetic work Un dhikri pour nos morts play with the frontiers of language, silence, and translation, especially in a (post-)colonial contexts, to express a world in which belonging supersedes verbal language or in which the dominant language is repurposed for sociopolitical purposes. In Appanah’s novel, a displaced Creole boy and an orphaned Jewish refugee meet each other is a prison camp on Mauritius. The boys communicate primarily in gestures, sobs, and acts of nonverbal language because their only common spoken language is very broken French. Elbadawi writes a narrative of return in which he expresses the disquieting feeling of living on the margins of a society, both socially and linguistically. He writes of a similar frustration vis-à-vis language by blending French, Shikomori, and some Swahili and Arabic. This code switching is aggressive toward a reader who is not proficient is the “minor” cultural registers. This move in part addresses, and on the other hand challenges, Franz Fanon’s notion that writing in the language of the colonizer suggests and acceptance or adoption of the colonizer’s culture. Both of these authors insert blank spaces, such as untranslated or untranslatable text, illustratrating Gayathri Spivak’s theory of equivalence in “language” translation and Steiner’s view that translation produces a third language. This third language is silence.

Biography forthcoming