(Re-)Thinking Home: 21st-Century Caribbean Diaspora Writing and Geopolitical Imaginaries in North America

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wilfried Raussert
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 393947293

In a world characterized by global capitalism, extreme inequalities, and mass migrations, questions of belonging and home become particularly pressing. The proposed research project explores the (re-)thinking of home in a diversified corpus of 21st-century Anglophone diaspora writing by Caribbean authors of different origins, who reside in the US or Canada. In taking an interdisciplinary approach, which fosters dialogue between the study of literature, the social sciences, as well as cultural studies paradigms of space and mobility, the project aspires to develop innovative insights on the complex issues of home and belonging, their (re)negotiation in contemporary diaspora writing, and in relation to shifting geopolitical imaginaries in North America. Recent Inter-American Studies and Comparative North American Studies/Literature paradigms that view the Americas as mobile and interconnected function as overall analytical framework.The research thesis which is to be investigated can be phrased as follows: 21st- century Caribbean diaspora writers in Canada and the United States employ aesthetic forms of fictional and non-fictional writing to represent the diverse and complex experiences of the multiply dispersed, transmigrant Caribbean diaspora. Their literary texts challenge and (re-)construct mode(l)s of transnational forms of belonging and function as potential productive spaces in which notions of home may be discursively (re-)produced and (re-)negotiated. Central to this investigation will be the interrelated questions of how actors of the Caribbean diaspora mobilize their inherited and/or constructed complex and often contradictory locations and positionings to (re-)think and (re-)write home and how this mobilization is materialized in contemporary works of Caribbean diaspora writers. Other objectives include the critical assessment and development of im/migration-related terminologies such as diaspora and transmigration, as well as of paradigms, or lenses, of translocation and translocational positionality (Anthias 2012) which serve to conceptualize the complex positionings of the diasporic subject. In this way, the project claims that aesthetic artifacts can function to inspire the development of theory. The project further argues that the analysis of home in the chosen writings presents a valuable starting point for the exploration of geopolitical imaginaries on a theoretical level. The project explores the Caribbean, Canada, and the US as connected im/migrant locations. It critically challenges and ventures beyond a reductive North-South divide and enters into an urgently needed dialogue of multiple relations within the Americas. As there exists comparatively little research which takes a practical case-study approach in applying more recent spatio-temporal and socio-spatial terminologies to the study of home in (postcolonial) literatures in the Americas, this research project intends to close an important gap.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants