Lecture: The (Germanophone) Poem and the (Connected) World

 

This talk will bring discussions of lyric poetry and its affordances together with thinking about race and identity, specifically through postcolonial theory and poetics. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s conception of “Relation” as multidirectional and dynamic interconnection, I trace paths from Rainer Maria Rilke in Paris to Algeria, Sudan, and the Caribbean. In doing so, I aim to re-think the canon and the margins of German poetry as porous and open to contestation. This means both expanding definitions of “Germanness” and setting Germanophone and other language texts into relation, tracking routes of mutual strangeness and influence.