Literature and Reconciliation in a Transoceanic Perspective

The aim of the seminar is an exchange between three projects, which deal with reconciliation between indigenous/enslaved populations and settler states/former colonial powers. All three projects focus on fiction, considering authors and works of fiction as significant actors in cultural memory.

At the seminar, Hanna Teichler will present her project Carnivalizing Reconciliation: Contemporary Australian and Canadian Literature and Film Beyond the Victim Paradigm, and Mads Anders Baggesgaard will present the project Authoring Slavery: Authorship and Agency in Narratives of Slavery in Ghana. Kirsten Thisted and Emilie Dybdal will present the project Between Pride and Shame: Postcolonial Renegotiations of Greenland as Part of Danish Cultural Heritage. The three presentations are followed by a roundtable discussion between the presenters and guests. What are the most urgent questions for this kind of research here and now? Stuart Hall warns that a power-free universe is unattainable because, with the breaking of one silence, a new one easily arises. Based on the same line of thinking, David Scott is less interested in specific answers to the questions of a given time than in what question space a given time opens up: What questions are we concerned with, and what questions is it even possible to ask? Mathias Danbolt chairs the discussion. Guests: Mette Sandbye, Martyn Richard Bone and Anne Green Munk.

Programme

09:15 Hanna Teichler Carnivalizing Reconciliation: Memory Work beyond the Victim Paradigm
10:00 Break
10:15 Mads Anders Baggesgaard Authoring Slavery: Collaborations around Questions of Authorship and Agency in Narratives of Slavery in Ghana
11:00 Break
11:15 Emilie Dybdal Attachment and Atonement? The Potential of Prosthetic Memory in Iben Mondrup’s Tabita
12:00 Break
13:00 Roundtable discussion

 

Bios

  • Hanna Teichler is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. She is the author of Carnivalizing Reconciliation (Berghahn, 2021), co-editor-in-chief of Memory Studies Review (Brill, forthcoming) and editor of Mobilizing Memories and The Handbook Series in Memory Studies (with Rebekah Vince, Brill). She is co-founder of the interdisciplinary research network ReOTi – Rethinking the Order of Time and together with Astrid Erll director of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform.

  • Mads Anders Baggesgaard is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Culture – Comparative Literature, at Aarhus University. He was Head of the research project Reading Slavery and he is now Head of The Centre for the Study of the Literatures and Cultures of Slavery, which connects a series of research initiatives related to modern (1440-) forms of slavery and their past and present repercussions across continents. He is the editor of the journal Passage and has published extensively on literary imprints of Danish slavery and colonialism as well as on francophone literature, cinema and thought.

  • Kirsten Thisted is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Culture, Language and History, Ilisimatusarfik, University of Greenland. She has published extensively on Danish-Greenlandic relations, Greenlandic oral traditions and modern literature, Danish representations of Greenland etc. She was Head of the international research project Denmark and the New North Atlantic, which in 2019 published a two-volume work, Denmark and the New North Atlantic: Narratives and Memories in a Former Empire. Currently Head of the research project Between Pride and Shame: Postcolonial Renegotiations of Greenland as Part of Danish Cultural Heritage.

  • Emilie Dybdal is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her PhD project has the working title Renegotiated: Danish Literature as a Stage for Imagining Danish-Greenlandic Relations and is part of the collaborative research project Between Pride and Shame: Postcolonial Renegotiations of Greenland as Part of Danish Cultural Heritage. She has published on both Danish literature and Greenlandic film production.