SEM Transculturalismes : Pavan Malreddy (Goethe University Frankfurt), « The Right to Un-belong: Ethics and Aesthetics of Contemporary Migrant literature »

Conventional debates on the figure of the migrant – in its myriad iterations as the displaced, diasporic subject, exile, refugee – have tended to focus on the process of the movement itself, the political and economic conditions that led to such movement, the egregious conditions aroused by such movement, and the trials and tribulations of the subjects who are subjected to such movement. Accordingly, the debates on migrants and moving subjects in literary studies follow a linear trajectory of the migrant figure arriving from a point of origin (typically in the global periphery) to a destination (typically the Global North). This unreflective imagination of the migrant figure has been the source of xenophobia and other cultural anxieties all over the world. This talks challenges this standardized view of the migrant as ethnocentric, nostalgic, homebound, or obsessed with home culture and customs by arguing that – from a selection of contemporary novels and short fiction – new migrant figures do not seek to arrive from a point of origin to a point of destination. Instead, they reject the very idea of home and enter a world of liminal permeance, proclaiming their right to un-belong both from the homes they have departed from, and the destinations they have arrived at.

(Literature: Mohsin Hamid’s Exist West; William Kentridge’s “Shadow Procession”; Warsan Shire’s “Home”; Hisham Mater’s The Return)

Pavan Kumar Malreddy teaches at Goethe University Frankfurt. He has published numerous essays and book chapters on race, postcolonialism, terrorism, and Indigenous politics in journals such as Third Text, Textual Practice, CounterText, Third World Quarterly, Intertexts, Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Text, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Distinktion, Intertexts, Wasafiri, The European Legacy, and AlterNative, among others. He has also co-edited essay collections on Brexit, populism, and the war on terror, and recently completed his second monograph titled Insurgent Cultures: Narratives of Violence from the Global South.