Moving Centers & Traveling Cultures
October 10-12, 2018
Goethe University, Frankfurt
On occasion of the 6th Postgraduate Forum Postcolonial Narrations, we are interested in exploring how contemporary forms of movement and their representations in the domains of art, literature, and media transform received notions of nation and culture. Forced and/or economic migration, displacement, and other forms of movement fundamentally affect collectives, established power hierarchies, and discourses of national and cultural identity. Refugee streams, for example, which in recent years have reached the midst of ‘Western cultures’, have sometimes led to mass measures of assistance and protection from states, but also to the rise of populist movements, reiterations of conservative nationalism, and heated debates on who belongs and who does not. Similar debates and reactions arise in connection with economic migrants, “guest” workers or so-called “illegal” migrants. In these cases, the Global South literally and figuratively becomes a neighbor to and a part of the Global North.
At the same time, “Westerners” are moving to countries in the Global South (as it happens, for instance, in the case of the Portuguese “brain drain” to Mozambique and Angola), indicating that spaces of opportunity and prosperity are no longer primarily perceived to be located in the West. Evidently, such realities go beyond the traditional categorization and separation of nations and cultures into global power centres and peripheries. Accordingly … read more