Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin (Anthropological Horizons) - Softcover

Brandel, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1487543697 ISBN 13: 9781487543693

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2023

Synopsis

In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city – a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of Berlin is made literary – from old neighbourhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. Highlighting the differences, tensions, and contradictions of these scenes, this book reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migration.

Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, rich historical archives, and literary analysis, Moving Words examines the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths. Along the way, Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and in space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Brandel is an associate instructional professor of the social sciences at the University of Chicago.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1487543697
• ISBN 13: 9781487543693
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 284