Shade comes from reading... reading came first

An uneventful update from Puo-An:

We have spoken to 2 senior professors (my thesis advisors) and 1 guest professor about our ideas, and so far, it seems that the structures at the Humboldt University will not allow for much change. One of the senior professors seemed very supportive and recommended we look at the Excellence Initiative, but unfortunately he's retiring after this term. The other wasn't interested at all. She suggested speaking to the faculty of the Asian and African Studies Institute if I wanted to write my dissertation on sinophone diaspora. 

The guest professor, Dr. Christine Vogt-William, was wonderfully helpful and very generous with her insight. She warned me that this was a Juggernaut (her word choice) of a project and that it'd be a lot of work, but also offered (among other things) a lengthy list of scholars, publications, existing academic programs and conferences centered on diaspora and migration in Germany and in Europe. In the end, we agreed that a conference would be a manageable way to gage interest and work out some of the basic issues, and that Nina and I urgently need to find backing from the professors who are the decision makers. A possible next step is to think about setting up a program, which entails a whole new set of questions and issues. It was the most exciting and frightening conversation I've had in some time.

By the way: Grada Kilomba is a guest professor at the HU, and she's pretty much on board.

As to our own projects: Whereas Nina is still waiting for the results of her M.A. thesis, I have just sent out my first dissertation exposé/application to the University of Cologne. There's a new project there called Reading Global, but as interesting as it might be (World Literature in the Global South with emphasis on Latin America), I don't really think I'll move to Cologne if I get the post. It was good to begin writing my ideas out anyway. I still have 4 months to write the exposés for the programs I really want to do, i.e. either registering as a PhD student at the Humboldt with (hopefully) a scholarship from the Chilean government, or the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School at the Free University with a scholarship from the DFG.

For the next month or so, I'll mostly just be either reading or compiling reading lists...

Reading List Diaspora

Knott, Kim and Seán McLoughlin (eds). Diasporas. 2013.
Patton, Cindy, Benigno Sánchez-Eppler et. al (eds). Queering Diasporas. 2000.
Braziel, Jana Evans, Anita Mannur (eds). Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. 2003.
Dominique Marçais, Bernard Vincent, et al (eds). Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas. 2002.

Reading List Diaspora, Chinese Speaking East Asia

Kuei-fen Chiu, Dafydd Fell, Lin Ping. Migration to and From Taiwan. 2013.

Sunil S. Amrith. Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. 2011.
Ma, Sheng-mei. Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture. 2011.
Ma, Laurence J. The Chinese Diaspora: Space, Place, Mobility, and Identity (Why of Where). 2003.

By Rey Chow:

Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. 1993.
Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. 1991.  
Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. 2000.
Between Languages. Comparative Literature Studies, Ed. R. Chow & Réda Bensmaïa. 42.4 (2005).

Reading List Postcolonialism, Modernity, Aesthetics

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. 1993.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. 2012.

This might also be interesting:

Kuortti, Joel. Transculturation and Aesthetics. Ambivalence, Power, and Literature. 2015.

Suggested additions or amendments?

Who we are...

We are two M.A. graduates of the Humboldt University, Berlin from the European Literatures program armed with a plan and a humble blog.

During our studies, our interests in the areas of post-colonialism, critical whitness, diaspora studies, and transdisciplinary approaches were often under-represented. We believe this was especially conspicuous to us because of our shared fragmented experiences as children of migrants. In reviewing our personal trajectories, we found that an ahistorical anchorlessness and an awareness of intersectional conflicts were the common denominators in two otherwise very disparate biographies.

Puo-An Wu was born in Santiago de Chile from Taiwanese immigrants during the tail-end of General Augusto Pinochet’s reign. Having a father who studied German in university, she received primary education in a German Catholic school. She relocated to the United States at the age of 14, where she attended high school and obtained a Bachelor of the Arts degree in European Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. She completed her Master of the Arts program in European Literatures in November 2014, with concentrations in German, English, and Spanish speaking literatures. Her areas of interest are narratology, reader response, hermeneutics, texturology, spatial theory, Derridian deconstruction, queer theory, post/de-colonialism, East Asian diasporas, and entangled histories.

Nina Kamooei was born in Limburg, Germany to Iranian refugee parents who fled across the Zagros mountain range. When she was eleven, her parents decided to relocate to Baltimore, Maryland. There, she attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, earning Bachelor of Arts degrees in Psychology and Modern Languages and Linguistics with certificates in German and Spanish. At the age of twenty-two, she finally received American citizenship after twenty-two years of statelessness and a period of illegal residence. She moved to Berlin, Germany upon receiving her first-ever passport and began her Master’s of Arts studies in European Literatures at the Humboldt University of Berlin, concentrating on migrant literature, Iranian Diaspora studies, queer theory, post-colonialism and spatial theory.

We decided to join forces and create a space within our alma mater where students and researchers of different disciplines can pursue their interests in Other voices, histories, and cultures. We would like to see a permanent fixture - in the form of a department, center or institute - emerge out of our efforts, where students working in various fields can find resources, instructional courses, peers, etc.

We want to question the white male canon within cultural and literary studies and bring the voices and experiences of the subaltern to the fore.

We want to bring greater focus – both in research and in physical presence – on the experiences of people of color, on migrant and diasporic studies.

We want to investigate the cultural production of migrants, exiles, and displaced peoples across the globe, as well as their descendants.

This blog serves to document our progress and inform possible supporters of our project. As of now, we are applying to PhD programs and researching existing platforms to start a pilot project.

Questions, comments, suggestions, and funding are highly encouraged.