Border Narratives - Brexit, Europe, and the UK
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?
FULL PROGRAMME
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
KAEE Annual Lecture: Cris Shore
Cris Shore (Goldsmiths University of London, UK):
‘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 as part of the conference.
Chair: Regina Bendix (KAEE)
ABSTRACT:
When the history books about Brexit are written one of the key questions asked will be ‘how did this happen?’ How did the UK – once renowned for stable governments, pragmatism, diplomacy, and over four decades in which EU membership had become the cornerstone of domestic and foreign policy – descend into such chaos and produce an outcome seemingly so harmful to its own economic interests and international standing? In this lecture I explore events surrounding the referendum and its outcome. Conventional explanations highlight internal struggles within the Conservative Party, failures of the ‘Vote Remain’ campaign and weaknesses of the UK’s ‘winner-takes-all’ electoral system. Yet other factors were also important, including decades of neoliberal policies, growing mistrust in government, fears about immigration, the rise of populism and neo-nationalism and increasing media hostility towards the EU and the liberal establishment. These elements produced a ‘perfect storm’ of discontent for which bumper-sticker slogans like ‘take back control’ offered a simple and appealing solution. However, none of these factors explain the widespread Euroscepticism that underpinned the Brexit vote. In this talk I offer some anthropological reflections on Brexit and trace the roots of Britain’s troubled relationship with the EU. Following Kathryn Verdery (1999), I argue that we need to examine the politics of Brexit in terms of ‘enchantment’ and what Maskovsky and Bjork-James (2021) call ‘angry politics’. If Brexit provides an anthropological window for analysing deeper fault lines in contemporary Britain, it also highlights problems in the EU, particularly its democratic deficit and the legacy of its austerity policies.
Brexit Talk: Sam Byers and Nele Pollatschek
Seit über einem Jahr sind die UK kein Teil der EUmehr, die Debatten über die gesellschaftlichen und politischen Auswirkungen des Brexits sind noch deutlich älter. Grund genug, nachzuvollziehen, aus welchem gesellschaftlichen Humus der Brexit sprießte und literarisch zu spekulieren, welche Konsequenzen er nach sich ziehen könnte. Nele Pollatschek liefert uns mit ihrem Erfahrungsbericht und selbst betitelten Liebesbrief Dear Oxbridge (Galiani 2020) Einblicke hinter die universitäre Fassade der weltweit bestaunten Eliteuniversitäten Cambridge und Oxford und die dortige Aufzucht der englischen Politiker*innen. Sam Byers entwirft in seinem Roman Schönes neues England (Klett-Cotta 2019) ein düsteres Zukunftsszenario: Ein völlig technisiertes Land, das von nationalen Interessen geprägt ist und aus Individuen zunehmend Narzisst*innen macht. Mit Kirsten Sandrock sprechen sie über das England vor und nach dem Brexit. Das Gespräch ist in englischer Sprache.
Das Autor*innengespräch findet im Rahmen der vom 5.-7. Mai ausgerichteten Tagung »Grenznarrative: Brexit, Europa und das Vereinigte Königreich« statt.
Kooperation mit dem Literarischen Zentrum Göttingen.
BREAKOUT ROOMS
