symposium singularity mc

Symposium Transnational Memories, Cultures & Identities

“Singularity: Diffracted Memories in Transnational Literature” Organised within the Transnational Memories research line of the Utrecht focus area “Cultures & Identities” (convenor: Birgit M. Kaiser) Dates/Time: Thursday 23 and Friday 24 June, 2011 Locations: see below In contemporary Western societies, recollections, according to which positions of articulation and identities are constructed and upon which literary fictions draw, are increasingly diffracted. That is, they are dispersed and transnational because they exceed any limited national framing and draw on a variety of imaginations that pertain to different locales and different personal inflections. As Jean-Luc Nancy holds, our increasing heterogeneity and cultural diversity in postcolonial Europe allows us to realize that being means “being singular plural”, it means that we realize that “not only are all people different but they are also all different from one another” (Nancy 8), unique and singular. At the same time, we also recognize that we share precisely this. This symposium wants to investigate ‘singularity’ as a way to study practices of writing that perform this heterogeneity and diffraction of memories and help to envision a “we”, which takes the coexistence of each and every singularity into account. Nancy calls such a “we” a “being-with” that affirms the “infinite plurality of origins and their coexistence” (10) and a “necessarily plural, diffracted” (14) world, in which each singular articulation constitutes one expression of this plurality. With this in view, the symposium will examine the diffraction and (re)collection of memories in transnational literatures. We will ask, looking at different literary cases, how this comes to bear, in a unique fashion, on different texts. How do these writings challenge our categories of national identities, and how do they experiment with new forms of (re)collections and memories? Do they weave singular articulations from this? And if so, what do they look like? With the help of transnational literatures – mainly Dutch-Moroccan, Turkish-German, and French-Maghrebian literatures – we will inquire if and how we can account for cultural heterogeneity by a focus on concrete, singular, contextualized literary practices, which are embedded in networks of relations and at the same time exceed these relations by way of imagination (of the future) and memories (of the past). Convenor: Birgit M. Kaiser (UU) Registration: [email protected] www.uu.nl/focusareas/cultures-identities


Programme Thursday 23 June, 10.00-17.00, Drift 21, zaal 0.05 (Sweelinckzaal), Utrecht 10.00 Introduction and opening words (Ann Rigney; Birgit Kaiser (both Utrecht)) 10.30 Panel one Nancy’s Being Singular Plural – Transnational literature and our lives in

hybridized spaces Speakers: Bart Phillipsen (Leuven); Jane Hiddleston (Oxford) Respondent: Emmanuelle Radar (Utrecht) 12.30 Lunch break 14.00 Interview Hafid Bouazza interviewed by Henriette Louwerse (Sheffield) 15.30 Coffee break 16.00-17.00 Lecture Leslie Adelson (Cornell) “Rusty Rails and Parallel Worlds: Trans-Latio in Yoko Tawada’s Das Nackte Auge (2004)” With a response by Michael Rothberg (U of Illinois, Urbana) 17.00 Reception Friday 24 June, 10.00-16.30, Janskerkhof 13, zaal 0.06, Utrecht 10.00 Panel two Transnational literary imagination and diffracted memories: metamorphoses of selves and witnessing of others

Speakers: Henriette Louwerse (Sheffield); Rosemarie Buikema (Utrecht) Respondent: Birgit M. Kaiser (Utrecht) 12.00 Lunch break 13.00 Panel three Moving Memories and literature’s new mother tongues Speakers: Yasemin Yildiz (U of Illinois, Urbana); Liesbeth Minnaard

(Leiden) Respondent: Gaston Franssen (U of Amsterdam) 15.00 Coffee break 15.30-16.30 Closing discussion For more information see: http://www.uu.nl/faculty/humanities/NL/Actueel/Agenda/Pages/20110623-symposium-singularity.aspx


Abstracts Literature and the profane community in/of Being singular plural Bart Philipsen (KU Leuven) This paper reads Jean-Luc Nancy's Être singulier pluriel/Being singular plural not just as a theoretical − philosophical, ontological − treatise which might be a useful methodological frame for looking at a literary corpus and investigating literary practices of writing in which the problem of singularity in the context of cultural hybridity and heterogeneity is addressed. Nancy's extensive essay addresses Literature as the discursive mode par excellence, a practice of reading and writing to testify of this being singular plural: "'Literature' means the being-in-common of what has no common origin but is originally in-common or with." (90) Philipsen situates this seemingly 'emphatic' notion of literature in Nancy's work in general and in a certain modern philosophical tradition as well as goes into the specific function of Literariness in relation to the stake of Being singular plural. What has literature got to do with the almost aporetic attempt to address a "we" that is not determined by a myth, which means "the infinite presupposition of its own identity and authenticity" (Eulogy for the Mêlée, 158)? Given the research questions of the workshop and the intention to investigate the literary strategies of imagination (of the future) and recollection (past), it is crucial to stress Nancy's attempt to think and speak of "an earth and a human such that they would be only what they are − nothing but earth and human − and such that they would be none of the various horizons often harbored under these names, none of the 'perspectives' or 'views' in view of which we have disfigured humans [les hommes] and driven them to despair" (xii) The "we" can only be the name of a reality that addresses the singular plural by thoroughly questioning such strategies that envisage a whole through projection onto an origin and anticipation of a final horizon of community. Literature seems to be the name of a language that is "the plural touching of the singular origin" (14). It refuses any eschatological − religious or secular, transcendent or immanent, mythological or institutional − appropriation and signification of the finitude of the singular plural, affirming the fact that there is "no meaning beyond this very Being of the world". 'Literature' therefore articulates a community that is utterly profane. Nancy and Djebar: Being Singular Plural in (Post)colonial Algeria Jane Hiddleston (Exeter College, Oxford) In some of the more politicised passages of Being Singular Plural, Nancy denounces the retrograde and potentially destructive impact of homogeneous conceptions of terms such as ‘culture’ or the ‘nation’. He suggests that collective terms such as these rest both on a restrictive demarcation of belonging from non-belonging, of inside from outside, and on a drive to represent the self as a specific identity founded in, and in turn founding, its society. He proposes instead a ‘retreat’ of political thought from these concepts, and he recommends a renewed understanding Being not as defined by any specified community but as constituted by its singular-plurality. Concomitantly, although Assia Djebar writes extensively about her upbringing in Algeria on the eve of decolonisation, she nevertheless, in accordance with Nancy’s thinking, seeks less to situate herself within the specific culture of the emergent postcolonial nation, than to explore how her experiences of living in the hybridised space of (post)colonial Algeria engenders a more open-ended understanding of relationality (in particular relationality within the family) and, indeed, of the singularity of her own autobiographical voice. This paper will draw on two aspects of Nancy’s thinking in Being Singular Plural and will how these are developed in Djebar’s most recent, and most apparently autobiographical work, Nulle part dans la maison de mon père [Nowhere in my Father’s House]. First, this latest work is Djebar’s most intimate and personal narrative of her childhood and adolescence, but rather than focusing on a search for origins, the text repeatedly refers to its narrator as ‘sans lieu’. In particular, Djebar’s repeated references to rootlessness bring a series of complex reflections on the narrator’s attachment to her parents – and it is this relationship that might be understood with reference to Nancy’s conception of complicity without communion or sameness. In addition, the narrative voice of the narrator herself is figured as ‘singular’, at least partially opaque, and beyond the confines of any notion of rootedness or cultural identity. Being singular plural, in its very absence of engagement with any particular cultural context, surprisingly offers a mode of thinking through relationality and voice more suited to Djebar’s singular autobiography than more specified, postcolonial theories of cultural identity and practice. Rusty Rails and Parallel Worlds: Trans-Latio in Yoko Tawada's Das nackte


Auge (2004) Leslie A. Adelson (Cornell University) A close reading of this multilingual, cosmopolitan, and pointedly transnational novel in German will provide the springboard for methodological reflections on new approaches to translation studies, comparative method, and literary analysis in relation to migration as a mode of movement. The lecture will focus on literary motifs of parallelism in Tawada's novel, beginning with train tracks (real and imagined) and extending to ostensibly parallel analytical paradigms such as "postcolonialism" and "post-socialism" after 1989, for example. The lecture will discuss how Tawada's literary exploration of lateral movement challenges us to consider the directionality of diffraction and to reconceive the trans-latio of contemporary translation studies. Tawada's singular Denkbild of parallelism in literary prose arguably signals a sea change in our critical options for understanding movement as a trope of collective experience. ‘Infinite Resistance’. Metamorphosis in the work of Hafid Bouazza Henriette Louwerse (Sheffield University) One of the essays in Hafid Bouazza’s most recent collection Heidense vreugde [Pagan Delight] is entitled ‘Diversiteit uw naam is zwendel’[Diversity thy name is swindle]. Bouazza discusses the initiative ‘Poems for the waiting room’: a project in which posters of poems of diverse cultures are printed both in the original language and in English translation to be displayed in doctor’s waiting rooms and other public places. Bouazza disapproves. For him diversity is all too often a cover-up for folklore: the hollow acting out of cultural stereotypes swathed in traditional dress and smelling of sentimental foods. Anybody familiar with Bouazza’s work will not be surprised at this response. In the Dutch cultural landscape Bouazza is well-known for his position as an advocate of absolute individualism. Shared culture, or even community are suspect and prone to repression of the individual. Yet Bouazza does show the desire, or the possibility, to connect, to seek common ground: his ‘land of the imagination’, where encounters can take place, where connection can be established away for all ethnic, religious or cultural markers, must be seen as an attempt to approach community away from predictable categories and essentialist suppositions. Bouazza pleads for a boundary free universe and in addition to the imaginary it is the physical, – the boundaries and limitations but also the celebration of the sensual – l that plays an important role in Bouazza’s work. Against the background of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking on human infinitude and limitations, I will attempt to engage with Bouazza’s treatment of the ‘out of body’ experience, of metamorphosis as a way to describe the self in relation to the other, in particularly in connection with this 2009 novel Spotvogel. Political fiction and the paradoxes of witnessing Rosemarie Buikema (Utrecht University) As South African literary critic Doroty Driver has pointed out, David's Story is a quintessentially South African novel, but in its literary and other allusions it not only proclaims itself part of a South African literary tradition but also explicitly sees that tradition as a transaction between European imperialist power and a colonised world. In my paper I will diffractedly read those two discursive genres while at the same time following the novels incorporation of literary criticism alongside the narrator's amateur detective work as vain attempts at some certitude or truth. The Fictitious Singularity of the Mother Tongue and its Postmonolingual Rewritings Yasemin Yildiz (University of Illinois) This talk seeks to distinguish between a rhetoric of singularity that underwrites what Nancy calls “common being,” on the one hand, and practices of singularity that open up to a mode of “being-in-common” and allow for difference as constitutional, on the other. Specifically, I argue that the fictitious singularity of the “mother tongue”—the idea that there is only one language into which one is born and to which one is uniquely connected—is a key idea constraining more plural visions of singularity. I elucidate how this fiction is tied to the emergence of monolingualism as a structuring principle of modernity, but also how the multilingual experimentation of transnational writing challenges this monolingual paradigm.


Discussing German-Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt and Turkish-German writers Aras Ören and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, I sketch the tension between the monolingual paradigm and varied multilingual practices as constitutive of what I call the “postmonolingual condition.” Moving Memories. Undoing Distance in Bouazza’s Story ‘De oversteek’ Liesbeth Minnaard (University of Leiden) This contribution to the symposium focuses on the Moroccan-Dutch writer Hafid Bouazza’s enigmatic short story ‘De oversteek’ [‘The Crossing’]. This story, that was added to the reprint of Bouazza’s succesful debut Abdullah’s Feet, six years after its first appearance in 1996, can be read as a particularly moving story, both in the literal as well as in the figurative sense of the term. As such ‘De oversteek’ offers an insightful demonstration of David Herman’s statement that ‘stories not only assume a relation between texts and contexts but sometimes work to reshape it’ (Herman 2002: 336). The actual reshaping of Abdullah’s Feet as story-collection not only disturbs (or redoes) the balance of the collection as a semantic whole, but the added story also reshapes the context of understanding the other stories in the collection. The story ‘De oversteek’, that jauntily but effectively appeals to an interpretative frame of discourses on and realities of Mediterranean migration, insists on other readings, readings that re-member what has been compelled to silence in a unilateral and divisive politics of memory. This event is made possible by the financial support of Cultures & Identities, Utrecht University Stichting Literatuurwetenschap Utrecht University Department of Dutch Studies, Utrecht University


Related event for advanced MA, RMA, and PhD students ___________

Masterclass Leslie Adelson (Cornell U) Migration Stories and Analytical Method: Emine Sevgi Özdamar's "Courtyard" in the Classroom How would you teach this text?

The masterclass will focus on Leslie Adelson’s work on transnational literature and take as a special example the literature contemporarily produced in German by writers of Turkish cultural and linguistic background. With special focus on a short story by German-Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar ("Der Hof im Spiegel" and Adelson’s English translation available in electronic publication), you will also dive into parts of her book The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (2005), and examine the cultural labor performed by these texts, a labor whereby writers imagine and create new spaces of cultural and literary articulation – as Adelson argued in her text “Against Between: A Manifesto”. The masterclass will discuss the labor of literary imagination, its evocation of phantasmatic spaces, and the potentials for articulation of heterogeneous voices in postcolonial Europe. These processes can be equally perceived in contemporary writers of migratory background who write in other European languages. In preparation of the master class, students are invited to send in focused questions beforehand. A reader will be made available via OSL, register via : [email protected] Leslie Adelson is Professor of German Studies at Cornell University since 1996, where she is also a Graduate Field member of Comparative Literature; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Jewish Studies. She teaches modern German literature, with an emphasis on literature since 1945, and postcolonial theories of culture and history. Much of her research focuses on minority discourses and migrant cultures in postwar Germany, especially those concerning Jews and Turks, and on interdisciplinary German cultural studies. Her English-language edition of Zafer Şenocak’s essays on politics and culture, Atlas of a Tropical Germany (2000), introduced a new sort of public intellectual in Germany to an international audience. An edited volume titled The Cultural After-Life of East Germany: New Transnational Perspectives (2002) raised new questions about the proper contexts for thinking GDR studies and transnationalism together. Supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2003, a seminal monograph addressed the significance of Turkish migration for contemporary German literature and migration studies alike. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005. Newer projects published under the rubric “Experiment Mars” revolve around the literary imagination as a form of labor and the conceit of futurity in German literature in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Date/Time: Wednesday, 22 June 2011, 15.00 to 17.30

Location: Kromme Nieuwegracht 80,

Ravensteinzaal (1.06), Utrecht

symposium singularity mc

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