- Julius-Maximilians - Universität Würzburg, English and American Studies, Faculty Memberadd
- Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, Disability Studies, Queer Studies, Postmodern Romance, Monsters and Monster Theory, and 39 morePostmodernism, Post-Colonial Theory, Feminist Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Queer Theory, Fat Studies, Monster Theory, Theories of Gender and Transgender, Fan Theory and Culture, Crip theory, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Postcolonial Feminism, Race and Ethnicity, Literature, Animal Studies, Transgender Studies, Critical Theory, Philosophy, Postmodern Literary Theory and Popular Culture, Post-Colonialism, English and American Studies, Subcultures, Cultural_Studies, Cultural Studies, Affect (Cultural Theory), Fandom Studies, Popular Romance Fiction, British Literature, Popular Culture, Urban Studies, Poststructuralism, Ethnicity and National Identity, Globalization, Masculinity Studies, Postcolonial Literature, Intimacy, Black British literature, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishiedit
- I am a postdoctoral researcher in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slav... moreI am a postdoctoral researcher in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, where I research and teach on slavery's global entanglements in the Black Atlantic world and beyond. I am currently working on a second book project which intertwines forms and media of black life writing with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecologies.
In my research and teaching I am particularly interested in relating literary texts, life writing documents and other strategies of imagination to cultural as well as socio-political formations of resistance, refusal and repair. My research interests span from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.
I received my PhD in English Literature from Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg. Published as Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds with Palgrave’s series on Contemporary Women’s Writing, it explores contemporary literature, culture and new media forms in interplay with feminist and postcolonial Anglophone perspectives.
My PhD research was completed with the support of travel and research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Volkswagen Stiftung, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften Würzburg, and Erasmus+, among others.
I received my MA in English Literature, American Literature and Comparative Literature from King's College London and Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, where I was awarded highest distinction for an MA thesis on the (de)construction of postcolonial female voice and identity in neo-Victorian narratives.
Research and Teaching Interests:
Contemporary Anglophone literatures, Anglophone literatures of the long nineteenth century, Cultural Studies, Caribbean Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Indian and Indian Diaspora Studies, Black Britain, Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism, the Blue Humanities.
For current projects and other activities, see my website: www.jenniferleetsch.comedit
This is a study of the female diasporic imagination. It sets out to investigate how Anglophone black women writers and performers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of contemporary globalization by querying the boundaries... more
This is a study of the female diasporic imagination. It sets out to investigate how Anglophone black women writers and performers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of contemporary globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space.
Making Love, Making Worlds breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and globalization. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, my analyses of literary works and medial performances by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation, displacement or rupture and towards a new emphasis on connection and intimacy. The book argues that, by attending to the deeply personal and relational while also depicting structural and geographical displacement in a time of global flows and refugee movements, these authors and performers strive to create possible inhabitable worlds. However, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a point of tracing the complexities of the voices and visions studied, of foregrounding their ability to engage with the harmful as well as the reparative results that come to be produced at the intersections of love, migration, and globalization.
Informed by a wide theoretical interest, the study combines careful literary analyses with in-depth discussions of cultural and socio-historical contexts. It does not only consider the world-making powers of the old novel form in the third millennium but also ponders the formative effect of new digital media. In holding on to the potential radicality of love, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a case for re-articulating an often-dismissed approach that originated in critical black feminist love studies. While theorisations of space necessarily abound in discussions of postcolonial literatures, my focus on affect introduces a very different entry point for analysis.
My choice of texts – ranging from Adichie’s spectacularly successful Americanah and Smith’s well-known London novels via Oyeyemi’s queer vampire fiction to the poems and performances of Patel and Shire – is due to the pronounced but varying significance they give to the interrelationships of space and love, of migration and affect. The works selected for close analysis provide an opportunity of studying various African diasporic imaginaries in concert with one another: Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Read alongside each other, the selected novels, poems and performances suggest a newly and differently connected global imaginary – an alternative to dominant constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive hegemonic dynamics at work on national as well as global levels.
Making Love, Making Worlds breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and globalization. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, my analyses of literary works and medial performances by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation, displacement or rupture and towards a new emphasis on connection and intimacy. The book argues that, by attending to the deeply personal and relational while also depicting structural and geographical displacement in a time of global flows and refugee movements, these authors and performers strive to create possible inhabitable worlds. However, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a point of tracing the complexities of the voices and visions studied, of foregrounding their ability to engage with the harmful as well as the reparative results that come to be produced at the intersections of love, migration, and globalization.
Informed by a wide theoretical interest, the study combines careful literary analyses with in-depth discussions of cultural and socio-historical contexts. It does not only consider the world-making powers of the old novel form in the third millennium but also ponders the formative effect of new digital media. In holding on to the potential radicality of love, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a case for re-articulating an often-dismissed approach that originated in critical black feminist love studies. While theorisations of space necessarily abound in discussions of postcolonial literatures, my focus on affect introduces a very different entry point for analysis.
My choice of texts – ranging from Adichie’s spectacularly successful Americanah and Smith’s well-known London novels via Oyeyemi’s queer vampire fiction to the poems and performances of Patel and Shire – is due to the pronounced but varying significance they give to the interrelationships of space and love, of migration and affect. The works selected for close analysis provide an opportunity of studying various African diasporic imaginaries in concert with one another: Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Read alongside each other, the selected novels, poems and performances suggest a newly and differently connected global imaginary – an alternative to dominant constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive hegemonic dynamics at work on national as well as global levels.
Research Interests: Refugee Studies, Black/African Diaspora, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, and 15 moreMigrant and Diasporic Literature, Somali Diaspora, Black British literature, Transnational Literature, London Writing, Zadie Smith, Indian Ocean literature, East African literature, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Postcolonial Gothic, Helen Oyeyemi, Migritude, Feminist Love Studies, Shailja Patel, and Warsan Shire
This article explores the work of Black British writer and Instagram poet Yrsa Daley-Ward in order to tease out new experimental forms of Black life writing in on- and offline media and to activate critical engagement with questions of... more
This article explores the work of Black British writer and Instagram poet Yrsa Daley-Ward in order to tease out new experimental forms of Black life writing in on- and offline media and to activate critical engagement with questions of authorship and authority, identity, and belonging. Daley-Ward's work will first be examined along the lines of its aesthetic, collaborative, and socio-economic practices and secondly located within a twenty-first-century context of digital spaces of online self-expression and social media. This approach updates and reinvigorates discussions about the shifting technologies of the self in order to place them in dialogue with more innovative and connective aesthetic strategies to tell stories of the self online and in print. Combining theories of collaborative autobiography and digital life writing, the article argues that by making her art available to an online audience, Daley-Ward generates spaces of participation and emancipation that contribute to new forms of world-wide relationality.
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This article offers a new reading of Mary Seacole’s autobiography from the perspective of material ecocriticism. The Black Atlantic origins of Seacole’s pharmacopoeia reveal a troubled, complex engagement with histories of medicine and... more
This article offers a new reading of Mary Seacole’s autobiography from the perspective of material ecocriticism. The Black Atlantic origins of Seacole’s pharmacopoeia reveal a troubled, complex engagement with histories of medicine and cure, with local indigenous knowledges, and with the often-violent circulation of plants and people across the planet. Paying close attention to instances in the text when plants meld and move with humans, within and beyond the Atlantic medical complex, the article links together vegetal materiality and medical, botanical histories of slavery, the plantation, and resistant black ecologies. To foreground the vibrant plant-human encounters at work in the text, the article selects three plants from Seacole’s medicine chest and follows their routes across the Black Atlantic, articulating how Seacole used her pharmacopoeia to save white Anglo patients while inadvertently addressing the long histories of slavery and colonialism.
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Shailja Patel’s Migritude engages in strategies of addressing, negotiating, and ultimately opposing violence that all play out along differing visual, textual, and material routes. Migritude can best be described as multi-modal and... more
Shailja Patel’s Migritude engages in strategies of addressing, negotiating, and ultimately opposing violence that all play out along differing visual, textual, and material routes. Migritude can best be described as multi-modal and hybrid; it initially originated as a spoken-word performance and has since metamorphosed and become a conglomeration of art, poetry, and autobiography in book form. It is not only the story of Patel’s own movements across the world, but is also intertwined with her family’s transoceanic migration stories from Gujarat to Nairobi as one possible narrative of the Asian-African diaspora. What lies at the heart of Migritude is a suitcase full of saris which Patel inherited from her mother: working with and through the cloth of the saris, Migritude showcases both female vulnerability and resistance. By transferring the saris’ affective materiality onto the stage and onto the page, Patel engages in processes of visually and physically engaging with the cloth of the sari to excavate stories of violence, trauma, and healing. This essay will outline how Migritude facilitates processes of resistance and of community building via performance, via intermedial and textual strategies, and via the physicality of its stage show. It posits that Migritude can be regarded as a visual and material text that words the oceanic travels of the Indian and African diaspora, and through its textile and textural indebtedness to the violent histories of colonization produces alternative spaces that further the notion of diasporic connectivity and encounter.
Research Interests: Postcolonial Studies, Black/African Diaspora, African Diaspora Studies, Migration Studies, Affect/Emotion, and 13 moreAffect Studies, Indian Ocean World, Diaspora and transnationalism, Indian Ocean literature, East African literature, New Materialism, Indian Diaspora, Textile, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Textile Studies, East African Poetry, Transoceanic Literature, and Shailja Patel
In his work on Indian Ocean crossings and Coolitude, Khal Torabully delineates how the routes of migrant workers and indentured labourers create a wide-reaching web that spans across oceans and continents, connecting India, China, and... more
In his work on Indian Ocean crossings and Coolitude, Khal Torabully delineates how the routes of migrant workers and indentured labourers create a wide-reaching web that spans across oceans and continents, connecting India, China, and Oceania to African and European shores. Taking up Torabully's thinking on global encounter and exchange, this article turns to M. G. Vassanji's The Gunny Sack (1989) and Shailja Patel's Migritude (2010), two literary texts which interlink East Africa with India via the water space of the Indian Ocean. It will argue that both expand the oceanic passage at the heart of their stories to address other, less geographically graspable poetics of travel. By connecting an early, seminal novel of the East African Asian diaspora with a more recent and experimental text, I will extrapolate the ways how these two texts give voice to journeys between Asia and East Africa across the Indian Ocean, and, situated at the borderlands between Africa and Asia, shed light on multiple, often contested, South-South connectivities.
Research Interests: African Diaspora Studies, African Diaspora, Indian Diaspora (Migration and Ethnicity), Migration Studies, Postcolonial Literature, and 10 moreIndian Ocean World, Indian Ocean literature, East African literature, East African Asians, East African Poetry, Transoceanic Literature, Shailja Patel, M.G. Vassanji, Kala Pani, and Coolitude
The following article posits the ocean as a connective, affective space. This notion of oceanic relationality lends itself to analyses of the work of Somalian-British poet Warsan Shire. In her work, we can find renditions of specifically... more
The following article posits the ocean as a connective, affective space. This notion of oceanic relationality lends itself to analyses of the work of Somalian-British poet Warsan Shire. In her work, we can find renditions of specifically located transoceanic trajectories which reach across various different water spaces: her poems connect the East African diaspora via the Northern Indian Ocean first to Northern Africa and the Middle East and from there via the Mediterranean to Europe. Shire’s poetry can thus be placed within a triadic structure as it forcefully speaks towards three different water spaces: the Indian Ocean; the Mediterranean; and, less directly so, the Black Atlantic. The simultaneously violent and transformative potential of these three water spaces take root in her oceanic imaginaries and thus the ocean emerges as a troubled but enabling site of multiple exchanges. I argue that Shire’s poetry constitutes the ocean not only as a deathly space, but also as generative: it offers up the possibilities of passage and movement, however dangerous they may be.
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To redraw the boundaries of what love, desire, and romance mean in the context of postcolonial and transnational writing, this article will use arguments by Anne Carson, Catherine Belsey, and others who regard love as inherently... more
To redraw the boundaries of what love, desire, and romance mean in the context of postcolonial and transnational writing, this article will use arguments by Anne Carson, Catherine Belsey, and others who regard love as inherently transformative, as the springboard for my discussion of Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie's novel Americanah (2013). The notion that love functions as a productive interruption of norms can be applied to three aspects of the novel: space, body, and text. The construction of a specific transnational space for the two protagonists of Americanah is marked by geographical travel and emotional border crossing. Accordingly, the first part of the paper will analyse how the lovers fashion their respective spaces of home and belonging, both in Africa and the diaspora. The second part of my analysis will focus on the bodily encounters Ifemelu and Obinze experience, and how intimate sexual acts of love may break down previously erected barriers. The third part of this paper will examine the textuality and language of Americanah's love story and how its romantic trajectory ultimately escapes its conventional boundaries – geographically, digitally, and meta-textually. In connecting love with spatiality, corporeality, and textuality in Adichie's novel, I acknowledge the different affects and effects of love and what it does – as material practice, as embodied experience, and as a discursive and textual construct. Writing a love story against oppression and against restrictive orders, Americanah engages in an empowering act of giving voice to the formerly silenced, of providing wiggle spaces for alternative identity constructions.
Research Interests: World Literatures, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Transnationalism, Postcolonial Studies, and 16 moreBlack/African Diaspora, Gender and Sexuality, African Literature, African American Literature, Postcolonial Feminism, African Diaspora, Postcolonial Literature, Affect Theory, Affect/Emotion, Transnational Feminism, Affect (Cultural Theory), Popular Romance Studies, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Globalisation, Gender in Americanah, and critical love studies
This chapter interweaves the subject of loneliness with an example of early-19th-century Black life-writing, the slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831), the first Black life narrative by a woman published in Britain, at a time... more
This chapter interweaves the subject of loneliness with an example of early-19th-century Black life-writing, the slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831), the first Black life narrative by a woman published in Britain, at a time of immense social rupture and change effected by anti-slavery and abolitionist politics. Locating the intersections of displacement and community in slavery life-writing across the Black Atlantic, this literary analysis contrasts the many contested communities at work in Prince’s text with the loneliness of her experiences in, through and after slavery. The chapter argues that loneliness, fragmentation and separation are fundamentally part of the slave narrative, just as much as the existence and continual rearticulation of Black community and solidarity. By focusing on loneliness as a condition constitutive of the genre, the chapter excavates the dynamics between the intimate feelings of loneliness, social isolation and systemic alienation as experienced by enslaved people, as well as inconspicuous yet wilful forms of community-building and acts of care that are activated in relation to and articulated through experiences of oppression, dehumanisation and objectification.
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Jennifer Leetsch’s contribution, entitled “Translocations of Desire: Urban Topographies of Love in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah,” explores the stages of settling down, travelling and homemaking connected to affects, emotions and desire... more
Jennifer Leetsch’s contribution, entitled “Translocations of Desire: Urban Topographies of Love in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah,” explores the stages of settling down, travelling and homemaking connected to affects, emotions and desire through the life of a Nigerian couple, whose divergent spatial narratives demonstrate the complexities of navigating the postcolonial world of late modernity. Her piece showcases how the narrative of romance that contains both the potentially destructive and reparative aspects of love (encompassing sexual encounters, desire, intimacy, and belonging) depends on and is at the same time implicated in the production of space and identities in cities as diverse as Philadelphia, Princeton, London, Newcastle and Lagos, resulting in situated knowledges which are able to re-politicize, re-map and re-connect territories.
Research Interests: World Literatures, Gender Studies, Globalization, Transnationalism, Postcolonial Studies, and 15 moreBlack/African Diaspora, Gender and Sexuality, Critical Race Theory, African Literature, African American Literature, Postcolonial Feminism, African Diaspora, Postcolonial Literature, Affect/Emotion, Transnational Feminism, Affect Studies, Affect, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Feminist Love Studies, and critical love studies
This chapter traces different forms of African European belonging in two novels by the Nigerian–British author Helen Oyeyemi. In both her 2007 novel The Opposite House and her 2009 novel White is for Witching, Oyeyemi expertly draws... more
This chapter traces different forms of African European belonging in two novels by the Nigerian–British author Helen Oyeyemi. In both her 2007 novel The Opposite House and her 2009 novel White is for Witching, Oyeyemi expertly draws together discourses about national identity and diaspora within the architectural space of the house. White is for Witching features a haunted guest house that tries to exclude those whom it considers to be foreign. The “somewherehouse” in The Opposite House has doors that lead to both Lagos and London, thus advocating a complicated multi-sited-ness. Both novels feature the house as a location for identity struggles while interrogating home and homeland. Even though initially internal, domestic, and exclusionary spaces, Oyeyemi’s homes become places filled with a plethora of diasporic identity constructs. In rendering the home un-homely and in de-nationalising the nation, the texts give way to other forms of belonging, fashioned by the female voices emerging from the narratives and their relationships—be they sexual, romantic, or familial, heteronormative or queer. This chapter thus pits the construction of explicitly diasporic, African European spaces against a more affective geography of practices of love and desire as developed in Oyeyemi’s texts.
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“Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi”. Leetsch J., entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: Postwar and Contemporary English Writing and Culture, 1945-present. Eds. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas, Kerry Myler, Deirdre Osborne, Judith Rahn and... more
“Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi”. Leetsch J., entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: Postwar and Contemporary English Writing and Culture, 1945-present. Eds. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas, Kerry Myler, Deirdre Osborne, Judith Rahn and Jenni Ramone. 14 May 2019.
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“Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi”. Leetsch J., entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: Postwar and Contemporary English Writing and Culture, 1945-present. Eds. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas, Kerry Myler, Deirdre Osborne, Judith Rahn and Jenni... more
“Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi”. Leetsch J., entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: Postwar and Contemporary English Writing and Culture, 1945-present. Eds. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas, Kerry Myler, Deirdre Osborne, Judith Rahn and Jenni Ramone. 03 September 2019.
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Pornografie ist eine Tatsache der menschlichen Lebenswelt: wir begegnen ihr in der modernen Gesellschaft genauso wie in der Antike oder der Vormoderne. Sie möchte erregen, indem sie Sexualität und sexuelles Begehren offen, vielfach... more
Pornografie ist eine Tatsache der menschlichen Lebenswelt: wir begegnen ihr in der modernen Gesellschaft genauso wie in der Antike oder der Vormoderne. Sie möchte erregen, indem sie Sexualität und sexuelles Begehren offen, vielfach geradezu übertrieben und aufdringlich dar- und herstellt. Darüber hinaus ist und war sie zumeist ein höchst aufgeladenes Phänomen, dem hitzige Debatten über Moral und Sittlichkeit sowie Ästhetik und Abartigkeit anhaften. Allein dies macht sie für Geistes-, Sozial-, Medien- und Rechtswissenschaften nicht nur interessant, sondern in erster Linie zu einem wichtigen Untersuchungsgegenstand. Im Umgang mit dem Thema Pornografie spiegeln sich Einstellungen, Normvorstellungen und Wertungen einer Kultur und Gesellschaft hinsichtlich der Darstellung sexueller Begierde und Sexualität im Allgemeinen wider. So bleibt zwar das Kerngeschäft der Pornografie, d.h. die sexuelle Erregung, konstant, doch verändern sich ihre ästhetischen Mittel und Inhalte im Vergleich der Epochen teilweise erheblich.
Dieser Band vereint unterschiedliche wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven und aktuelle Forschungsergebnisse zum Thema, wobei die Beiträge Pornografie in ihrem gegenwartsrele-vanten Kontext beschreiben und untersuchen. Die multidisziplinäre Perspektive auf das Phänomen der Pornografie macht deutlich, dass sie selten nur einen gesellschaftlichen Bereich berührt und daher kaum mit den Fragestellungen und Methoden einer einzigen Disziplin begriffen werden kann. Aus diesem Grund versammelt der Band Beiträge, die von Rechts- über Kultur-, Literatur-, Sprach-, Medien- und Sozialwissenschaften reichen und wirft einen Blick auf unterschiedliche Epochen und Kulturräume, wie etwa europäische Kulturen der Gegenwart, die USA der siebziger Jahre, China und seine Pornografie im 16. Jahrhundert oder pornografische Darstellungen im Kino und Fernsehen der Gegenwart.
Dieser Band vereint unterschiedliche wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven und aktuelle Forschungsergebnisse zum Thema, wobei die Beiträge Pornografie in ihrem gegenwartsrele-vanten Kontext beschreiben und untersuchen. Die multidisziplinäre Perspektive auf das Phänomen der Pornografie macht deutlich, dass sie selten nur einen gesellschaftlichen Bereich berührt und daher kaum mit den Fragestellungen und Methoden einer einzigen Disziplin begriffen werden kann. Aus diesem Grund versammelt der Band Beiträge, die von Rechts- über Kultur-, Literatur-, Sprach-, Medien- und Sozialwissenschaften reichen und wirft einen Blick auf unterschiedliche Epochen und Kulturräume, wie etwa europäische Kulturen der Gegenwart, die USA der siebziger Jahre, China und seine Pornografie im 16. Jahrhundert oder pornografische Darstellungen im Kino und Fernsehen der Gegenwart.
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Research Interests: African Diaspora Studies, African Literature, Environmental Politics, African Diaspora, Ecocriticism, and 11 moreNigeria, Somalia, Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Wangechi Mutu, Helon Habila, Petrocultures, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, History of African Ecology , and African ecology
Research Interests: Digital Humanities, Internet Studies, Refugee Studies, Black/African Diaspora, Poetry, and 11 moreAfrican Diaspora Studies, African Literature, International Migration, Migration Studies, Indian Ocean World, Black Atlantic, Black British literature, Digital Diaspora, Black British Women's Writing, Transoceanic Literature, and Warsan Shire
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Research Interests: Refugee Studies, Black/African Diaspora, African Literature, Indian Ocean World, Black Atlantic, and 11 moreSomali Diaspora, Black British literature, Edouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Middle passage and Black Atlantic Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Black British Women's Writing, Transoceanic Literature, Warsan Shire, Refugee Literature, and Isabel Hofmeyr
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Trauma Studies, and 11 moreFeminism, Postcolonial Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, World Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Literature and Trauma, Transnational Feminism, Diaspora and transnationalism, Corporeality, Globalisation, and Warsan Shire
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Globalization, Postcolonial Studies, Black/African Diaspora, Space and Place, and 14 moreGender and Sexuality, Urban Studies, Postcolonial Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Literature, Affect Theory, Affect/Emotion, Affect Studies, Affect (Cultural Theory), London Writing, London, Zadie Smith, and Spatial Turn
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This seminar will introduce students to the concept of ecological imperialism and the enduring ecological materialities of the plantation complex. Considering current approaches to environmental realities and relationalities in the... more
This seminar will introduce students to the concept of ecological imperialism and the enduring ecological materialities of the plantation complex. Considering current approaches to environmental realities and relationalities in the so-called Global South, this seminar will center the ongoing effects of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade on re-figurations of human and more-than-human ecologies.
With a focus on critical interventions from the social sciences, including discussions about the Anthropocene and Plantationocene, slow violence, extractivism, black ecology and black geography, we will encounter a variety of possible responses to environmental crisis within and beyond local and planetary scales.
With a focus on critical interventions from the social sciences, including discussions about the Anthropocene and Plantationocene, slow violence, extractivism, black ecology and black geography, we will encounter a variety of possible responses to environmental crisis within and beyond local and planetary scales.
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In this seminar, students will learn to think about dependency, slavery and indentured work within the context of Indian Ocean worlds, based on a textual/literary studies approach. Our case studies will consist of different literary texts... more
In this seminar, students will learn to think about dependency, slavery and indentured work within the context of Indian Ocean worlds, based on a textual/literary studies approach. Our case studies will consist of different literary texts that write and imagine relationships of dependency and Coolitude across the Indian Ocean and its concrete historical, geographical and cultural contexts.
By engaging with these literary sources, students will gain a deeper understanding of the global encounters and exchanges embedded in asymmetrical forms of slavery and dependency, and of how the routes of African, Asian and Arab migrant workers and indentured labourers have created a wide-reaching political, economic, ideological, and cultural web that spans across oceans and continents, connecting Asia and Oceania to African and European shores.
By engaging with these literary sources, students will gain a deeper understanding of the global encounters and exchanges embedded in asymmetrical forms of slavery and dependency, and of how the routes of African, Asian and Arab migrant workers and indentured labourers have created a wide-reaching political, economic, ideological, and cultural web that spans across oceans and continents, connecting Asia and Oceania to African and European shores.
Research Interests: Caribbean Literature, Caribbean History, Indian Ocean History, Indian Diaspora (Migration and Ethnicity), East Indian/South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean, and 12 moreGuyana, Indian Ocean World, Indian Indenture, David Dabydeen, Mauritius, India & East Africa, Indian Indenturership, Indentured labour migration, Indian Ocean Studies, Indentured Labor In Plantations, Coolitude, and Khal Torabully
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Selected contributions will be published open access in the Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies (Pluto Journals) in the special issue ‘Indentured Bodies / Embodiments of Indenture’ in December 2024, edited by Sinah Kloß and Jennifer... more
Selected contributions will be published open access in the Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies (Pluto Journals) in the special issue ‘Indentured Bodies / Embodiments of Indenture’ in December 2024, edited by Sinah Kloß and Jennifer Leetsch. Please send your abstracts (500 words) by March 31, 2023 to s.kloss@uni-bonn.de and jleetsch@uni-bonn.de. Selected full-length articles (5000-7000 words), photo essays and creative texts (up to 2500 words), and book reviews (1200-1500 words) will have to be submitted to the editors for peer review by November 30, 2023.
Research Interests: Anthropology of the Body, Embodiment, Uganda, South Africa (History), Labor History and Studies, and 15 moreGuyana, Indian Indenture, Mauritius, Guadeloupe, Suriname, French Guiana, Indo-Fijian culture, Trinidad and Tobago, History of the Body, Martinique, Jamaican history, Chinese indentured labor, British Colonial History in Malaya, Kenya History, and History of Indenture
In the panel discussion “Diversity in German Academia - A Reflective Look at the Current State,” scholars and activists will take stock of how German universities and research institutions currently attend to the matter of equal... more
In the panel discussion “Diversity in German Academia - A Reflective Look at the Current State,” scholars and activists will take stock of how German universities and research institutions currently attend to the matter of equal opportunities and diversity.
The panel discussion is designed to provide a space for the exchange of experience and knowledge: the panelists (Robel Afeworki Abay, Astrid Biele Mefebue, Paul Mecheril, Heike Pantelmann & Anne Waldschmidt) will critically consider measures and processes of change within institutions and reflect on how to further strengthen diversity awareness.
The panel is organized in collaboration with the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Unit; it is part of the Germany-wide Diversity Days (23-24 May 2023) at Bonn University.
https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/outreach/news-bcdss/panel-discussion-diversity-in-german-academia-on-may-23-2023
Time: Tuesday, 23.05.23 - 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Location: Festsaal (‘Ballroom’), University Main Building
Am Hof 1, 53113 Bonn
The panel discussion is designed to provide a space for the exchange of experience and knowledge: the panelists (Robel Afeworki Abay, Astrid Biele Mefebue, Paul Mecheril, Heike Pantelmann & Anne Waldschmidt) will critically consider measures and processes of change within institutions and reflect on how to further strengthen diversity awareness.
The panel is organized in collaboration with the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Unit; it is part of the Germany-wide Diversity Days (23-24 May 2023) at Bonn University.
https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/outreach/news-bcdss/panel-discussion-diversity-in-german-academia-on-may-23-2023
Time: Tuesday, 23.05.23 - 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Location: Festsaal (‘Ballroom’), University Main Building
Am Hof 1, 53113 Bonn
Research Interests:
International Online Conference February 25–26, 2021 Julius- Maximilians-Universität Würzburg We invite you to join us for the free and public events during the conference: Artist Intervention | Thursday, February 25 | 16:30–18:00... more
International Online Conference
February 25–26, 2021
Julius- Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
We invite you to join us for the free and public events during the conference:
Artist Intervention | Thursday, February 25 | 16:30–18:00 CET
Charl Landvreugd (Rotterdam, NL)
Notes on Ososma : Imagining Spaces
Keynote | Friday, February 26 | 10:00–11:30 CET
Ananya Jahanara Kabir (London, UK)
Moving Material: (Un)Making Migration through Dance
Reading & Discussion | Friday, February 26 | 18:00–19:30 CET
Olumide Popoola (London, UK)
Please register in advance via Zoom: t1p.de/im2021-zoom
***
For more details, see our website: imaginingmigration2020.wordpress.com
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Organised by
Jennifer Leetsch
Frederike Middelhoff
Miriam Wallraven
February 25–26, 2021
Julius- Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
We invite you to join us for the free and public events during the conference:
Artist Intervention | Thursday, February 25 | 16:30–18:00 CET
Charl Landvreugd (Rotterdam, NL)
Notes on Ososma : Imagining Spaces
Keynote | Friday, February 26 | 10:00–11:30 CET
Ananya Jahanara Kabir (London, UK)
Moving Material: (Un)Making Migration through Dance
Reading & Discussion | Friday, February 26 | 18:00–19:30 CET
Olumide Popoola (London, UK)
Please register in advance via Zoom: t1p.de/im2021-zoom
***
For more details, see our website: imaginingmigration2020.wordpress.com
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Organised by
Jennifer Leetsch
Frederike Middelhoff
Miriam Wallraven