Forschungsstelle für
deutsche Exilliteratur
Foto: Ildikó Felbinger
19. April 2022
Foto: Northwestern University / German Department
In Zusammenarbeit mit dem German Department der Northwestern University in Chicago (USA), an dem Doerte Bischoff derzeit als Max Kade Professorin zu Gast ist, findet am 05. Mai 2022 um 19.30 Uhr ein Online-Workshop zum Thema "Paper Existences: Passports and Literary Imagination" statt.
Im Zentrum der Diskussion, die von Respondenzen von Isabel von Holt und Xan Holt (beide NU) eingeleitet wird, steht eine Aufsatzpublikation von Doerte Bischoff zum Thema, die auch online abrufbar ist (PDF).
Der Workshop findet als Hybridveranstaltung auf Englisch statt.
Weitere Informationen finden Sie hier.
Beschreibung des Workshops:
In the aftermath of World War II, Hannah Arendt famously identifies stateless or displaced people as “the most symptomatic group in modern politics”. The perplexity that this group brought into focus was the fact that depriving individuals of their rights as citizens de facto deprived them of their human rights and, in a more fundamental sense, of their humanity.
One concrete example of literary examination of the politics of migration is the reference to passports and other forms of identification papers. These papers are more than just a means of governance but represent an allegory of the precarious status of identity and its legal confirmation/documentation. What does it mean to lead an undocumented life? How do I verify my identity as a (legal) human being? Literary texts, according to Doerte Bischoff, “explore not only the conditions of the individuality […], they also delineate decentered, transnational, and transformed visions of communities that challenge the model of the nation-state and the related concept of identity.”
The basis of our discussion will be Bischoff’s essay “Paper Existences: Passports and Literary Imagination”.