Tales of Unsettlement – The Global Novel in an Age of Refugees

Drawing on his current book project on refugees and the global novel, in this lecture B. Venkat Mani asks how would our understanding of “contemporariness” (Gegenwärtigkeit) change if unsettlement, rather than settlement, became the keyword for framing our study of literature? Mani contends that forced migration and refuge shape and inform the human condition in the twenty-first century, and therefore must be centralized and elevated to our literary evaluations—within the university as well as in the larger public sphere. Focusing on developments in the contemporary novel, the lecture will also underscore the significance of a global comparative literary and historical framework in the twenty-first century to undo structures of disciplinary ethno-nationalism. 

B. Venkat Mani is Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities, and the Senior Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s the author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (2007) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Cultures, and Germany’s Pact with Books (2017; winner of GSA’s DAAD Book Prize and MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, 2018). He is the editor or co-editor of over seven volumes including Wiley Blackwell’s Companion to World Literature (2020) and German Quarterly’s Forum: “World Literature, Against Isolationist Readings” (2021), and currently co-editing PMLA Options for German Literature for the 21st Century. His recent articles have appeared in SubStance, New German Critique, PMLA, and several anthologies. He was recently appointed on the editorial board of the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft. He has  published public humanities essays in Inside Higher Ed, Telos, The Wire (Hindi), The Hindustan Times, and The Indian Express. Mani has received many grants and fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship, Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Grant, a Title VI National Resource Grant for the Center for South Asia, and residential fellowships at Zentrum für Literaturforschung (ZfL, Berlin) and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA, Marbach).