Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Wednesday, March 24, 2021Lecture
10:45 am CET
Sam Selvon's Lonely Londoners (1956) is a seminal novel in many ways. Politically, it charts the woes, hopes and sometimes joys of migration, explores the deliberate construction of difference and conflict which gained momentum in the fifties and exposes the homelessness and the fragility of communities. But Selvon also narrates the human and aesthetic treasures of creolization and hyphenization and the virtues of cultural ‘contamination’. The talk will concentrate on three different - but interrelated - aspects of the novel:
- Remapping London, in a funny mimicry of the maps once drawn by European colonizers when they ‘discovered’ the New world.
- A verbal feast? How is the English language appropriated, manipulated and ultimately re-created?
- Calypso aesthetics, music and orality.
Caroline Patey studied English and Comparative literature in Paris (Paris III), Dublin UCD and the Università degli Studi, Milan, where she was chair professor of English literature until 2018. Her interests and fields of research include Renaissance literature, late Victorian culture and modernism with a special focus on intermediality, the intersection between museum and literature and the cross-border circulation of cultures and aesthetic forms.
This event is moderated by BCB Professor for Comparative Literature Laura Scuriatti.
Further events in the series:
March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan
March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen
March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan
March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan
April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen
April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen
April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti
April 26, 10:45 am
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff
April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan
The event series takes place within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.
* Funded by the Open Society University Network
Email: [email protected]