Most new methods in border studies have come from beyond our discipline. Anthropologists such as Suvendrini Perera (“A Pacific Zone?”), Maurizio Albahari (Crimes of Peace), Jason De León (Land of Open Graves), Mezzadra and Neilson (Border as Method), among others, have helped us move away from the border-as-wall model to think instead of borders as dynamic systems: a clockwork of funnels and filters and contested mobilities across an entire geography. Borders are adaptive and reflexive assemblages that move through and across geographies, institutions, and bodies. This special session takes these insights from the field of border studies and brings them to literary studies, seeking out new methodological and theoretical dialogues across a diverse range of languages and area studies.
After opening remarks from Karen Emmerich, Graham Liddell’s “Crossing the Border of the Literary: Asylum Narrative as Genre” will look at the boundary between the literary and the non-literary, taking contemporary stories of irregular migration in the Mediterranean region as a case study. The ability to formulate a successful asylum narrative requires many of the same skills exhibited by effective authors. Liddell uses the tools of literary studies to analyze the everyday actions and living speech of Arab and Afghan asylum seekers in Greece, revealing underlying relationships between craftiness and craft, artifice and art, transgression and translation.
Will Stroebel will consider the partition of the so-called Near East in the early 20th century. His paper, “Philology’s Borderscape and the Making of Refugee Literatures,” examines the devastating role of philology during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when the Mediterranean was carved up at the edges of Europe and the Middle East. After the fallout of ethnic cleansing and genocide, what was philology’s role in circumscribing the institutional visibility of certain unwanted refugee literatures, such as Greek-language Islamic poetry, written in the Arabic alphabet by Greek-speaking Muslims? Philologists and publishers defined modern literature by systematically dispossessing and "undocumenting" refugee literatures across a newly minted civilizational borderscape.
Waïl Hassan’s “Comparing the Literatures of the Global South” will focus on the historical and epistemological borders within our discipline. Comparative Literature began and has largely remained a subset of European studies. Even postcolonial studies could not do without the centrality of the West: the admission of previously excluded literatures comes at the cost of tying them to colonial history and metropolitan canons—what Hassan describes as the North-South paradigm. A shift away from these institutional borders to interregional, or cross-regional, South-South relations can in principle bypass the centrality of (post)colonial relations to advance the project of decolonizing knowledge. In unpacking this idea, Hassan will focus on the example of Arab-Latin American relations.
Karen Emmerich will conclude the panel with a response paper that draws from her new book project. How do literary canons intersect with legal canons of belonging? What, in other words, is the role of citizenship and migration in the construction of literary canonicity? When and how do the architects of a national literature mobilize, remobilize, or immobilize a given emigre or immigrant writer and to what end? Her response will trace out the throughlines across the panel: geopolitical borders, institutional borders, generic borders, and ideological borders that limit the visibility of storytelling in and beyond our discipline.
This panel attempts to incorporate a diversity of voices on multiple levels. We include scholars from every rank: contingent faculty, untenured faculty, associate professor, professor. Our institutional affiliations range from public universities to a small liberal arts college to a private university. Given that several of the geopolitical borders under discussion intersect with Middle East Studies, it’s also crucial that Waïl Hassan foregrounds a self-identifying MENA perspective. Karen Emmerich will anchor the entire panel and her role as both convener and respondent is pivotal.
The three papers will run 15-16 minutes while the response paper will run 10 minutes, allowing for about 15-20 minutes of discussion.