Postmigrant Literary History Seminarium Litteraturvetenskap

Wiebke Sievers, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. She has been working as migration researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna since 2003. She studied literary translation at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf and the Université Stendhal in Grenoble. Her PhD in Translation Studies at the University of Warwick focused on the translation of contemporary German prose in Britain and France. Her work on postmigrant literary history is based on her habilitation completed at the European University in Frankfurt/Oder where she also teaches.

Postmigrant literary history is a new approach to writing literary history. It combines elements of both traditional national literary history and more recent transnational and global approaches to understand how literary fields change through migration. Telling postmigrant literary history does not mean telling the history of migrant writing. Rather, it means putting migrants centre stage in literary history. It means telling the history of their writing in the context of a specific literary field. The first step towards such a postmigrant perspective is migrantising literary history, i.e. rewriting it from a perspective that includes migrants also when they had no access to literary fields. This analysis grants insight into how migrants came to be excluded from literary fields in the process of their nationalisation. The second step is telling the history of how migrants overcame this exclusion in postmigrant alliances with other actors, such as publishers and critics, and tried to influence the discourse of migration with their writing. I fully develop this approach in my forthcoming book Postmigrantische Literaturgeschichte and apply it to the Austrian literary field. My paper will discuss the theoretical foundations of my approach and present some results of my empirical study. In particular, I will explain how the invention of the Austrian literary language in the 1960s led to the exclusion of migrants from the Austrian literary field. Subsequently, I will discuss how Anna Kim’s works overcome this exclusion by opening Austrianness for people of colour and writing world literature in German that raises awareness of human suffering worldwide.