Organised by Susanne Klengel, project Border Temporalities and/in Literature, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities" in cooperation with the Institute of Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. This event is part of the lecture series "Border Temporalities. Doing Literature in a World of Walls".

Speaker: Johan Schimanski (University of Oslo)

Certain ongoing processes connected to bordering practices, such as migration and pandemics, have been presented in the public sphere as "crises", unconnected to more complex, long-term temporalities. Such long-duration conditions and changes have been brought to the public attention in investigative journalism and social sciences research. The temporalities of bordering practices have been the subject of intense ethnographic research in migration studies, as well as on a more theoretical level by border studies scholars. The literatures of migration and other forms of bordering often address even longer duration temporalities, providing an antidote to the shorter scale narratives of politics and news media.

Given that borders are usually seen as spatial phenomena, how do they allow for temporality, and more particularly temporal borders or transition? Borders and borderlands have been addressed in historical terms as subject to bordering, debordering and rebordering, as mobile, and as palimpsestual border landscapes. Border poetics has focused on the analysis of more everyday border-crossing narratives, involving complex spatio-temporal figurations of the border. In this lecture, Schimanski discusses both borderlands literature and the focus on the long-duration nature of migration in migration literature. He argues for making connections between temporalities of border-crossings described by literary texts and crossings of literary texts themselves into the public sphere.

Johan Schimanski is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. He has worked on 18th century literary forgeries, literature in Welsh, science fiction, genre theory, lyric poetry, national identity in literature, arctic discourses, author museums, postcolonialism and border poetics. Previously, at UiT The Arctic University of Norway he has co-coordinated the Border Aesthetics Project (2010-2013), the Arctic Discourses project (2005-2012), the Border Poetics research group, and the Arctic Modernities project (2013-2016). At University of Oslo he has led the Temporalities and Subjectivies of Border-Crossing Nordic workshop series (2019-2022). His recent book publications include Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings (ed. with Jopi Nyman), 2021; Grenzungen: Versuche zu einer Poetik der Grenze, 2020; Living Together - Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community (ed. with Knut Stene-Johansen and Christian Refsum), 2018, and Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections (ed. with Stephen F. Wolfe), 2017.