Poetics of Relational and Intersectional Identities: African

1) Wider research context/theoretical framework: Austria remains a neglected geographical space in the fields of African-diasporic literatures and African-European relations despite the increasing number of African-diasporic writers in Austria. Their creative works in Amharic, Arabic, English, French, and German span novels, poems, autrebiographies’ (Lenta), and ‘autofiction’ (Engelhaaf), merging individual and collective experiences to address the complexities of being, seeing, and (un)belonging, art and identity that speak to current geopolitical Euro-African environments. The project will merge theoretical approaches: 1. The Poetics of Relational and Intersectional Identities (Glissant, Crenshaw, Salisu) and 2. “Over there is in the here” (Chamoiseau) and “Comparative Poetics of War” (Mazrui).
2) Hypotheses/research questions/objectives: We hypothesize that the selected writers meet at the intersection of political literature, migration studies, intercultural communication, critical diversity, gender and antidiscrimination, and social artivism. The leading question is: Writing and performing from their marginalised and intersectional positions in Austria, what kinds of relational and intersectional poetics do the writers develop and how do these enrich the dominantly ‘white’ Austrian literary landscape and ‘Black Europe’? The project will 1. provide a much-needed aesthetic and socio-political analysis of the cartography of the African diasporic literary presence in Austria, 2. develop a new multimodal and multilingual approach in studying African-diasporic literatures that can be useful in related disciplines such as African Studies, Black Austrian Studies and conceptualisations of ‘Black Europe’.
3) Approach/methods: The project’s methodological set is fourfold: 1. Continuous documentation: field and library research in Austria. 2. Slowly reading: Wilm (2016) explores the text’s sensual dimension, slowly acknowledging the pace, the rhythm, the musicality of/in sentences, paragraphs, and punctuation. 3. Semi-structured respectful interviews with writers to highlight how careful biographical criticism can serve as complementary material for analysing the writers’ complex repertoires, and 4. Production-Circulation-Reception: Exploring the material, institutional, and technological conditions of the production and circulation of selected works and accompanying the writers during events in Austria.
4) Level of originality/innovation: This project will 1. cover a new ground in African Diaspora Studies, 2. merge theories in understanding African-diasporic literatures in the wider context of “African-European” relations, Black Europe, and 3. design a context-sensitive and multilingual research method.
5) Primary Researchers Involved: Rémi Tchokothe, tenure-track professor of African Comparative Literatures, will head the project. Laura Kisser, M.A. in African Comparative Literatures under the PI’s supervision, will do her PhD in the project.