Guest Lecture Alexandra Ganser (Universität Wien)
Literary texts help us understand refugee subjectivities as subjectivities deprived of agency and involuntarily deterritorialized in toto—physically as well as in terms of cultural identity. In addition, most refugees suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), having to live with life-long consequences of traumatic events connected to flight. In my lecture, I am taking up the prevalence of flight to Western societies, which are today exhorted once more to shelter the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse“ of so many shores, “the homeless“ and “tempest-tossed,“ to recall Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus“ (1883) engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. I will discuss the articulation of flight and PTSD in Chinese-Malaysian Canadian Madeleine Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter (2011). Thien examines the Red Khmer genocide in Cambodia and its consequences for the children that came to Canada as refugees. The text is informed by what Achille Mbembe has called the necropolitics of genocide and demographic control rather than by the topoi of classic immigrant narratives, which usually begin with the migrants’ arrival and focuses on immigrant life in a new environment. This necropolitics, as Mbembe claims, dictates who may live and who must die, who finds shelter and who is left to drown; accordingly, Thien offers insights into such precarious, deterritorialized subjectivities that can sensitize us towards refugee lives in our own environment.
Alexandra Ganser is professor for American literary and cultural studies and Executive Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies (ZKS) at the University of Vienna. She holds a doctoral degree in American literary and cultural studies from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Her dissertation was published as Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970-2000 (Rodopi, 2009). She was Christoph-Daniel-Ebeling Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society (2010) and is Fulbright Alumna (University of Oklahoma at Norman, 2003/04). Her research interests include mobility studies (she is Key Researcher of the interdisciplinary platform Mobile Cultures and Societies, Univ. of Vienna), early American and antebellum popular culture, gender studies, transatlantic American studies, Native American studies, and ecocriticism. Her current book project, sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), examines transatlantic representations of piracy before the Civil War and is titled Crisis and Discourses of (Il)Legitimacy in Transatlantic Narratives of Piracy, 1678‒1865. It will be published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. Other book publications include: Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives: Figures of Mobility in American Culture and Beyond (ed. with Heike Paul & Katharina Gerund, 2012) and Transgressive Television: Politics, Crime, and Citizenship in 21st-Century American TV Series (ed. with Birgit Daewes and Nicole Poppenhagen, Winter 2015).
The event is free and open to the public.
This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies.
Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at