Border Narratives - Brexit, Europe, and the UK
5-7 May, 2021
Organisers: Lars Klein and Kirsten Sandrock
Conference assistants: Cora Övermann and Akash Saxena
The conference took place via Zoom.
Abstracts and programme booklet: PDF
Selected papers of this conference have been published as part of the focus issue "Border Narratives" of Anglistik, 34(3), 2023.
Borders have played a decisive role in the Brexit referendum. The decision to leave or remain in the EU was often framed in the national media as a border referendum and political scientists agree that the vote gives evidence to widespread public opposition to open border policies in the UK. The conference Border Narratives: Brexit, Europe, and the UK seeks to shed light on these issues from a literary and cultural studies perspective. We are particularly interested in investigating narratives of borders in relation to Brexit and the ways in which recent border debates interact with greater historical, cultural, and epistemological border stories.
Guiding conference questions are: How are the UK's borders negotiated in literary and cultural works? Is there a particular border aesthetics in recent works of art? How do material, political, geophysical and economic contexts feature in border narratives? And, vice versa, how do border narratives become relevant for the larger political, economic, and ideological context? Where can the field of border studies help theorizing border narratives in Europe and the UK, and where are other tools necessary for this context?
PROGRAMME
Day 1: Wednesday, 5 May
15:30 Conference opening
Greetings: Barbara Schaff (British Literature and Culture); Simon Fink (Political System of Germany / EMJMD Euroculture)
16:00 Keynote 1: Kristian Shaw (Lincoln, UK),
‘This Blessed Plot’: BrexLit and the Island Mentality ABSTRACT
Chair: Kirsten Sandrock
17:00 Break (INSTRUCTIONS on how to use the break out rooms)
17:15 Panel 1: BrexLit and Borders
Caroline Lusin (Mannheim, Germany),
“Homeric Warriors and Ancient Rites. (R)Evoking Borders in Michael Hughes’ Country (2018) and Sarah Moss’ Ghost Wall (2018)” ABSTRACT
Wolfgang Funk (Mainz, Germany),
“‘The Last Line of Defence’: The Politics of Border Control in Contemporary English Fiction” ABSTRACT
Mark Schmitt (Dortmund, Germany)
“‘No Happiness without (B)order’:Brexit, Collective Ecstasy and Transgression in Niall Griffiths’s Broken Ghost” ABSTRACT
Chair: Kristian Shaw
18:45 Break
19:30 Annual Lecture in European Ethnology
Cris Shore (London, UK),ABSTRACT
‘How Did it Come to This?’ Britain, Brexit and Euroscepticism from an Anthropological Perspective
Organized jointly with the “Institut für Kulturanthropologie / Europäische Ethnologie” and the “Centre for Global Migration Studies”
Chair: Regina Bendix
20:30 Online Socializing via wonder.me (INSTRUCTIONS on how to navigate our room)
Day 2: Thursday, 6 May
10:00 Keynote 2: Astrid Fellner (Saarbrücken, Germany),
“The Border Turn in Literary Studies: Border Poetics and Figurations of Border Crossings” ABSTRACT
Chair: Brigitte Glaser
11:00 Break (INSTRUCTIONS on how to use the break out rooms)
11:15 Panel 2: Between Us and Them: Lanchester’s The Wall and BritLit
Victoria Herche (Köln, Germany),
“Of Boats and Walls: Migrating Iconographies in John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019)” ABSTRACT
Dunja M. Mohr (Erfurt, Germany),
“’Who knows what old hatreds will loosen across the land now?’ Border Stories and Brexit in Contemporary British Literature” ABSTRACT
Chair: Sabina Fazli
12:15 Break
14:00 Panel 3: Borders of the Nation: Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet
Lena Steveker (Belval, Luxembourg),
“Fenced Off and Walled In: Narrating British Borders in Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019)” ABSTRACT
Dennis Henneböhl (Paderborn, Germany),
“The Representation of External and Internal Borders and their Interaction with National Identity in Ali Smith’s ‘Seasonal Quartet’” ABSTRACT
Chair: Jens Elze
15:00 Break
15:30 Panel 4: Adaptation and Resistance
Anja Hartl (Konstanz, Germany),
“Adaptation as Border-Crossing Practice in Ali Smith's Autumn” ABSTRACT
Gioia Angeletti and Maria Elena Capitani (Parma, Italy),
“Europeanness, Border Aesthetics and Resistance in David Greig’s anti-Brexit Plays” ABSTRACT
Chair: Cora Övermann
16:30 Break (INSTRUCTIONS on how to use the break out rooms)
17:00 Keynote 3:
Barbara Korte und Christian Mair (Freiburg, Germany),
“Sybille Berg's GRM Brainfuck as a Dystopia of Bordered Britain” ABSTRACT
Chair: Barbara Schaff
20:00 Brexit-Talk
Reading by Nele Pollatschek and Sam Byers
Co-organized with Literarisches Zentrum Göttingen
Day 3: Friday, 7 May
10:00 Keynote 4: Katharina Rennhak (Wuppertal, Germany),
The Kinopolitics of Irish Border Novels: Facts, Fictions and Affect ABSTRACT
Chair: Ralf Haekel
11:00 Break (INSTRUCTIONS on how to use the break out rooms)
11:15 Panel 5: Bordering and Rebordering in Ireland
Joachim Frenk (Saarbrücken, Germany),
“There’s Him There: Northern Irish Border Narratives in the Works of Glenn Patterson” ABSTRACT
Ralf Haekel (Leipzig, Germany),
“‘over the road’, ‘over the water’ and ‘over the border’" – Political, social, and mental borders in Anna Burns’s Milkman” ABSTRACT
Chair: Anca Radu
12:15 Break
13:30 Panel 6: Digital Revolution and Migration
Marcin Galent (Kraków, Poland),
“How a Digital Revolution Dismantled the Borders of the British Polity During the Brexit” ABSTRACT
Luiza-Maria Filimon (Constanta, Romania),
“‘They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais…’: Reviewing the Use of Dog Whistles in the Tory Discourse Surrounding Immigration” ABSTRACT
Chair: Lars Klein
14:30 Concluding Remarks & Publication Plans
BREAKOUT ROOMS
