Diasporic Social Imaginaries, Transisthmian Echoes and Transfigurations of Central American Subjectivities

Throughout the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, Central American writers, in and outside of the isthmus, have written in response to political and social violence and multiple forms of racial, economic, gendered, and other oppressions, while also seeking to produce alternative social imaginaries for the region and its peoples. Spanning the civil war and post-war periods and often writing from the space of prolonged and temporary diaspora as exiles, sojourners, and migrants, in their respective works, writers such as Claribel Alegría, Gioconda Belli, and Martivón Galindo have not only represented the most critical historical moments in the region but moreover transfigured the personal and collective social woundings of Central America into new signs and representations of the isthmus, often from other sites. Read together, their texts offer a gendered literary topography of war, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization and imagine other “geographies of identities” as suggested by Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg for post-conflict, diasporic societies. These writers’ work is testament to the transformative and transfigurative power of women’s writing in the Central American transisthmus.

Literature in Japanese (Nihongo bungaku): An Examination of the New Literary Topography by Plurilingual Writers from the 1990s

Since the 1990s, a number of plurilingual writers have published works with a heightened consciousness of incorporating different languages in the Japanese text, in the original and/or in translation, resulting in a gradual transformation of the literary topography. This paper will focus on the works by Hideo Levy (b. 1950), On Yūjū (b. 1980), and Yokoyama Yūta (b. 1981). These writers share a deep knowledge of and concern for the East Asian cultural sphere, especially the literature and culture in various Chinese societies. Using different writing and notational strategies, they resist the traditional method of “blending Japanese and Chinese” (wakan yūgō) and immerse themselves in the creative space in between Japanese and Chinese languages and cultures (including dialects and minority cultures), in search of a new language to document a plurilingual self and the world. Their experimentations in writing contributes to the emergence of literature in Japanese (Nihongo bungaku) as a body of work born of a language of hybridity and deeply engaged with plurilingual notations in its creation, written in Japanese by authors who are not necessarily Japanese nationals. With reference to Theodore Adorno’s theory of the “nonorganic nature” of language, Katō Shūichi’s celebration of the culture of hybridity, and Charles Ferguson’s idea of diglossia, this paper examines the potential and limitations of these writing experiments and the changing literary topography they engendered.

Mystisches Schwabing

Who were the participants in the ‘Cosmic Round’ that made Schwabing a magical place around 1900? And what can the ‘Cosmics’ still tell us today? The contributions in this conference volume address these questions. Their aim is to revive research on the mystical tendencies of Munich's literary topography at the turn of the century. The topics of inquiry include Karl Wolfskehl‘s poems and Stefan George’s social circle, Ludwig Derleth's secret writing system, Ludwig Klages’ themes and the reflections on group dispositives of the Munich bohemian world. The contexts of the mystical Schwabing, where the Kosmik was born, where Stefan George met the god Maximin, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing carried out his séance experiments and the Countess von Reventlow received her guests, are invocations of a literarily and artistically intertwined occultism. This anthology sets out to reevaluate this field, not least to encourage further academic interest. With contributions by Alina Boy, Marco Castellari, Gloria Colombo, Peter Czoik, Nastasja Dresler, Richard Faber, Jonas Meurer, Heinz-Peter Preußer, Gabriele von Bassermann, Viktoria Walter and Kay Wolfinger

From Haifa to Ramallah (and Back): New/Old Palestinian Literary Topography

This article explores border crossing and the Palestinian city as a literary metropolis—two major themes in the works of emerging Palestinian novelists in Israel. It looks at the “re-Palestinization” of urban space by writers who belong to a post-Oslo generation of Palestinian intellectuals that left villages and small towns in Israel to go and study, work, and live in the city. What distinguishes the literature of this generation is its negotiation of border crossing in a fragmented geography and its engagement with the city as a space of paradoxical encounter between a national imaginary and a settler-colonial reality. Based on a critical reading of their works, the article argues that Adania Shibli and Ibtisam Azem challenge colonial border discourse, exposing the ongoing Zionist erasure of the Palestinian city and creating a new topography for Palestinian literature. The article also traces the role of these writers in the “twinning” of Haifa and Ramallah starting in the late 1990s, and it examines how this literary and cultural “sisterhood” informs spatial resistance.

A Displaced City and Postmemory

This chapter examines how Sinophone writers from PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong compose their Beijing narratives to articulate their anxiety and desire, frustrated and fluid subjectivities. Liang Shiqiu a Beijing native, Taipei dweller, literary guru, and sophisticated connoisseur of fine cuisine, writes about Beijing cuisine to evoke emotional affiliation, gastronomic nostalgia, and imagined reunion. Both originally from Taiwan, Lin Haiyin romanticizes her memory of the south side of Beijing from an innocent girl’s perspective, while Zhong Lihe sharply criticizes the inferior and filthy life of Beijing’s social underclass and paints a bleak urban picture in his disillusioning discovery of the old capital during the Chinese Civil War. Hong Kong émigré writer Jin Yong intertwines literary topography and martial-arts fantasy, inscribes post-loyalist attachments and detachments onto the city, and suggests a hybrid and flexible identity, formed in the chivalric gestures of intervening in core political urban settings and fleeing to the margins and frontiers. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a dislocated and relocated Beijing appears in the border-crossing diasporic writing and Sinophone postmemory.

Beijing and Beyond

This chapter situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese urban literature, and charts the trajectories of affective mapping of major cities in the Chinese-speaking world against the great backdrop of the downfall of the (Manchu) Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold war and globalizing world. The main issues are modern urban awareness, historical consciousness, individual/collective memories, and nationalist perceptions regarding the old and new capital, Beijing; the semicolonial metropolis and socialist Shanghai and its remnants; the traumatized and aloof Nanjing; the abandoned capital, Xi’an; Taipei under Japanese colonial rule and the subsequent Nationalist Party’s dominance; and Hong Kong from a British Crown Colony to a Special Administrative Region of China. Urban experiences, emotional vicissitudes, and literary topography continue to provide illustrating and illuminating methods of mapping Sinophone cities.