Presented by Peter Schneck, Professor and Chair of American Literature and Culture at Osnabrück University, and currently the director of the Institute for English and American Studies and Laura A. Zander, Assistant Professor at Osnabrück University and a principal investigator (PI) in a cooperative research project with the Institute for English and American Studies at Osnabrück and the Chair for International and Human Rights Law (Nora Markard) at the University of Münster.

TUESDAY 25 MARCH
12.00-14.00
IYATSIBA LAB, GREATMORE, WOODSTOCK

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Literature, poetry, and the performing arts have long been integral forms of identification and mobilisation in political activism and social movements, but particularly so in advocating for equality, rights, and social justice. Since the Romantic era, artistic practices have been understood to form audiences as 'imaginary communities' and to provide vehicles for resistance and emancipation through strategic aesthetic interventions. Such efforts aimed to align the affective and cognitive dimension of experience with political objectives and ideals, e.g. facilitating collective empowerment and subjective agency as means for political participation and emancipation. As a result, the modern subject appears to be constituted at the intersection of the political and the aesthetic.

The relation between art and politics is especially critical within frameworks of emphatically democratic aesthetics, as, for instance, in Dewey or, obviously more radically, Rancière, that insist on the inevitability or necessity, even, of aligning aesthetic practices of (self-) expression with political subjectivation. In the same vein, narratives addressing global migration in recent human rights literature, can be said to increasingly negotiate and engage in self-determined subjectification, challenging traditional legal norms and advocating for new forms of (legal) agency, thus offering alternative representations of marginalized subjects and their claims for rights.

From this perspective on aesthetics and politics in debates on migration and human rights, our talk aims to examine how the writings of Valeria Luiselli and Behrouz Boochani's No Friend But the Mountains (2018) function as complex – and ambivalent – literary archives of displacement and migration. Luiselli's and Boochani's works not simply document migrancy but also explicitly reproach and
resist legal narratives through literary storytelling. Luiselli employs an archival approach, blending documented reality with fiction to critique the limitations of conventional legal narratives. Boochani's account, written from within an Australian detention center, provides a poetic counter-narrative that tries to resist oppressive structures while seeking to dismantle the political structures that sustain what the author identifies as Kyriarchal system in Australia's "border-industrial complex."

In order to further question the notion of the literary archive and its particular 'political' aesthetics, we will turn to Timothy Bewes' notion of a "postfictional age" to explore how Luiselli's and Boochani's narrative strategies try to enhance literature's capacity
to both register and critically revise conventional scripts and expectations in regard to testifying and witnessing human rights violations as an experience that is both factual and fictional. Ultimately, our discussion attempts to highlight literature's potential to document, critique, and reimagine narratives of migration and displacement, positioning literary archives as vital sites of resistance and advocacy.