Department of Comparative Literature

Minority German Literature, Black Internationalism, and Futurity

Speaker: Arina Rotaru, Lecturer, NYU Shanghai

Moderator: Dr. Daniel Vukovich, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Once celebrated by the award of a literary prize dedicated to “migrant authors,” minority German literature has become a staple of contemporary world literature. This talk analyzes the rise of the Afro-German literary movement, its concerns with social justice, race, gender, and poetics, and the commonalities it shares with German Turkish literature and performance through tropes of blackness. Second, the presentation poses questions about the relations between minority German literature and black internationalism as an early form of exchange and activism that contributes to world literature in Western and non-Western contexts. The talk concludes by considering the function of futurity in minority literatures.

Speaker bio:

Arina Rotaru is a Lecturer at NYU Shanghai and a visitor at the Center for the Study of Cultures and Globalization at the University of Hong Kong. She holds a PhD in German Studies and Comparative Literature from Cornell University and her research covers avant-garde literature and film, postcolonial studies, world literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of World Literature, Germanic Review, Forum for Modern Language Studies and edited collections on Worlding Asia, Totalitarian Arts, and Aesthetics and Politics. She is currently working on two book projects on contemporary avant-garde literature in twenty-first German-speaking literature and on diasporic poetics.

Date: 10 April 2019
Time: 2-3:30pm
Venue: 4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

All are welcome.

For general enquiries, please contact Christine Vicera at viceracn@hku.hk