Category: Events Page 2 of 3

After attending the first and second panels of the Jewish Literature, World Literature conference, there were many takeaways that I was presented with as well as a mass of new information that I learned, primarily from Dr. Schachter’s and Dr. Levy’s talks. A recurring theme for me through both of these presentations was the role of women in Judaism and in Jewish culture and how they are portrayed in literature. Dr. Schachter mentioned that Jewish women writers themselves were often seen as “hysterical or historical”, and I find this to be an accurate description of many women writers I’ve read from the age of revolution up until the modern era. Names who are widely read now such as Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, who is the namesake of the phenomenon that states poets are more susceptible to mental illness than other creative writers, were all women who were seen as emotionally and mentally distraught, yet still made their way into copious literary canons today. I believe that the racialization of Jewish women authors in particular also added to such a categorization and this drew parallels for me within the literature of African-American women writers who were often seen as too radical or dismissed as serious authors altogether. I was quite pleased when Dr. Schachter compared Lorraine Hansberry and Tillie Olsen in her presentation because this reflected very similarly to the comparison I was making on my own as a graduate student in German Studies who often looks at the intersections of the African American and Afro-German diasporas through music and literature. From listening to Dr. Schachter, something I would communicate to a broader audience is not only the affinities that women writers of other backgrounds share with Jewish women, but also how stories of Jewishness intersect with other marginalized groups. For example, this conference, I was unaware that Lorraine Hansberry had created a play with a Jewish protagonist and having been written by a Black woman who has faced her own share of discrimination in 1950’s America, I can imagine the analogies Hansberry was able to create in her work.

Since I am unfamiliar with the plot of this play, my curiosity would be to discover what issues faced by the Jewish characters can also be juxtaposed onto Hansberry’s own experiences and that of the experiences of the African American community as well. To relate this to Mapping Jewish Modernism, I feel as if this is a different type of mapping Jewishness- not necessarily referring to geographical regions, but looking at what spaces Jewishness also permeates on a social level when it comes to interaction with other minority groups in one area. This subject is discussed in Jewish literature specifically concerning the inhabitation of ghettos and what communities this encompasses in different parts of the world. In this same vein, another linguistic intersection that was new to me was the language of Ladino. I had never heard of this before and now I am anxious to learn about the Jewish experiences in Hispanic and Latin American cultures. As a Spanish speaker, I could understand small excerpts of Ladino that were shared by Dr. Levy and Dr. Balbuena and it felt similarly to how I can also understand certain words in Yiddish due to my knowledge of German. I am vaguely aware of Jewish authors that lived in Brazil and wrote in Portuguese, but I was not aware that Ladino was also a language that emerged from Jewish migration. My greatest takeaway from the Jewish Literature, World Literature conference is that there are many more overlaps with my own research interests and cultures with Jewishness and Jewish culture than I had initially expected. This excites me for future topics on Jewishness that I will learn about and what will continue to be covered via Mapping Jewish Modernism, as I will be looking for more ways to relate to Jewish literature through my own background as a student and an academic.

   In her talk entitled ‘Women’s Internationalism and Jewish Literature’, Allison Schachter highlights the fact that women’s absence from the canon of Jewish Modernism means that we know less about Jewish Modernism than we think. Her research makes use of a holistic approach to women’s writing in Jewish Modernism that puts the emphasis on reading different Jewish women writers as well as non-Jewish women associated to Jewish modernism together and in their own contexts in order to bring to light the broader experience of women writers in Jewish modernism. This not only broadens what we might think of as Jewish Modernism but also forces a shift of what is already known, as it highlights the fact that the conception we have of Jewish modernism as it is formed mostly by Jewish male writers and artists has to be reevaluated in light of what is being excluded.

   In her talk Schachter underlines the tendency to characterize Jewish women writers as ‘hysterical’, which raises several questions. What is it about the position of Jewish women writers that is so alienating? How do Jewish modernist women writers fit in a wider context of women modernist writers being labeled as hysterical? How does this topic of female hysteria in modernism fit into a longer history of this term? Are there separate histories of the term dependent on the other identities of women writers, such as being Jewish or African-American?

   Allison Schachter indicates that although new rights and freedoms were appearing for women writers during the modernist period, these were only maintained for those included in and protected by citizenship, which in many places would have excluded Jewish women as well as African-American women. Her attempt to think in terms of intersectionality about what it means to be a women, while also being a writer, while also being Jewish or African American, brings to light the attempted project of the book ‘Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf’ by Natania Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld, attempts to study how these identities interact when they are not united in one person but rather in one marriage. Allison Schachter focuses specifically on writers such as Lorraine Hansberry who are examples of modernist women writers on the fringes of Jewish Modernism. Hansberry was an African-American writer and was married to a Jewish man, thus thinking of her in the context of Jewish Modernism in some sense mirrors Rosenfeld’s project in ‘Outsiders Together’ as her association to Jewish Modernism, is – as it is for Virginia Woolf – an association through marriage. Schachter suggests that Hansberry experienced both antisemitism and racism, and that much of her writing was left unpublished, which was typical for women writers associated with Jewish Modernism. To explore these processes of exclusion and its consequences on Jewish modernist writers and writing is to historicize the creation of the canons of Jewish modernist writing we read today and to take part in the creation of a new, more inclusive literary history.

Both Lital Levy and Adi Nester’s research projects revolve around the complexities of a negotiated, modern Jewish identity in the Diaspora. Levy traces the post-life of British Jewish writer Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars by examining the universal and particular elements of its subsequent translations into important vernacular Jewish languages, such as German, Hebrew, Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic.[1] Each translator had local, specific, ideological versions of Jewish modernity which they aspired to communicate to their respective linguistic and national audiences. Though not the first Hebrew translation of The Vale of Cedars, Abraham Friedberg’s 1875 translation became the textual basis for subsequent translations. Whereas Aguilar’s text could be considered in part as an appeal to her fellow British Jewish women to retain their Jewish identity as they were confronted with pressure to convert to Christianity from British Protestant society, it was also an appeal to the British gentile audience, itself, to respect the culturally assimilated Jewish population. This cultural assimilation can perhaps be seen as an outgrowth of the Jewish Enlightenment, with which Levy is concerned. Without removing the female character, Friedberg and subsequent translators replaced the Jewish female protagonist with one who was male. Levy argues that protecting feminine virtues and asserting Jewish masculinity were important elements for the male translators’ own interpretations of Enlightenment. Writing in vernacular Jewish languages, these translators did not have to appeal to gentile audiences, enabling a significantly more “Jewish” text than might have initially been feasible in the British context.

In her examination of the life and literary career of German (Jewish) essayist, poet, and translator Rudolf Borchardt, Nester attempts to comprehend the significance of Jewishness for the studied author. Though of Jewish descent, Borchardt’s family had converted to Protestantism. Despite Borchardt’s Jewish heritage, he held nationalist and authoritarian political views. Recognized as being Jewish by the German Jewish population and German antisemites alike, he often had to defend his body of work, which he saw as representative of his perceived place in leading high German culture. According to Borchardt, the only way for the Jewish population to integrate into German society was through conversion to Christianity, rejecting any notion that one could privately be Jewish and consider themselves to be German. Here, we see the limitations of Jewish Enlightenment in an increasingly nationalistic and right-wing society.

Levy’s case study presents an image of Jewishness which is international, though the particularities of each linguistic and cultural context are crucial to internal community dynamics. However, through the translations, each linguistic community’s notion of Jewishness is strengthened through the ideological particularities the translator imparts to their respective audience. I admittedly find Nester’s case study problematic. What seems to be a literary analysis comes off as an attempt to psychologize Borchardt. Jewish identity, and any identity in the modern world, are not only self-defined, but defined in relation to others. Whose definition of Jewishness are we considering? That of the antisemitic National Socialists? That of the broadly defined German Jewish community?  Or that of Borchardt, himself? Self-definition should be prioritized, but given the historical context, that of the would-be perpetrators of the Holocaust, cannot be ignored, even if this author’s emphasis is deemed anachronistic.

[1] I include German as a vernacular Jewish language due to the birth of the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany, which was led by culturally assimilated Jews.

Participants at the Global Jewish Modernism conference have demonstrated, though in different ways, that the boundaries of Jewish literatures are never stable but always liquid. They do not conform to the strict models of national literatures and make us rethink both literary and academic canons.

In the first place, Jewish literatures are often formed across borders, tracing unexpected connections between different cultures, countries, and languages. A perfect example of this transnationality is the diasporic Sephardic poetry discussed by Monique Balbuena. The map of these writings would include, among others, Bosnia and France of Clarisse Nicoïdski (1938-1996), Greece and Israel of Moshe Ha-Elion (1925-2022) and Margalit Matitiahu, Argentina of Juan Gelman (1930-2014), Bulgaria and Mexico of Myriam Moscona. Although for many of the authors, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) is not the first language, they decided to write in Ladino or incorporate Judeo-Spanish elements in their texts in other languages. In their works, Judeo-Spanish acts as an intimate language of memory, exile, and trauma (not coincidentally, both Ha-Elion and Matitiahu wrote their poems about the atrocities of the Holocaust in Ladino and not in Hebrew). However, Judeo-Spanish represents not only death but also life: authors across the globe revitalize the dying vernacular of the Sephardic Jews, and paradoxically, this fragile language, which has no official status in any country, creates a tangible network of Sephardic poets and their texts.

Moreover, Jewish literatures frequently trouble established rules and predominant narratives within the existing scholarship and criticism, as Saskia Ziolkowski explained in her presentation “Modern Jewish Italian Writing as World Literature.” Academic works on world literature tended to focus mostly on the writings from the “centers,” ignoring the “peripheries” that refer both to Italian literature (since Italy is a Southern-European and less “powerful” country) and “minor” Jewish literatures. At the same time, in global Jewish literary studies, Jewish Italian writers do not gain much attention (apart from the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi), though many key twentieth-century Italian authors were of Jewish background (Italo Svevo, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Giorgio Bassani, to name just a few). Rather than operating through labels and oppositions (“Italian” versus “Jewish”), one might see Jewish Italian literature as a fluid space that also includes non-Jewish authors. Some of them (Igiaba Scego and Claudio Magris) investigate the often silenced role of Italy in the persecution of Jews, while others (Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Nadia Terranova, and Jhumpa Lahiri) engage with works of the Jewish Italian authors of the twentieth century in their own novels. Such an unusual look at modern and contemporary Italian writings illuminates how “Jewish Italian literature is.”

This “intrinsic” Jewishness helps reconsider Italian literature from a transnational perspective. Many Italian authors (especially women writers), both Jewish and non-Jewish, that were mentioned in Saskia Ziolkowski’s presentation, have been recently (re)translated into English and other languages. As a result, Italian literature in its international reception is frequently associated with writers who exceed the rigid definitions of the Italian literary canon and national and linguistic identity. Some of these authors are particularly important to my own work. Helena Janeczek comes from a Polish Jewish family, but she moved from Germany to Italy and started writing in Italian. She is one of the most prominent contemporary Italian writers and the author of the award-winning novel The Girl with the Leica about the photographer Gerda Taro (I worked as a translation editor for the Russian edition of the book which came out in 2021). The Turinese Marina Jarre (1925-2016) was born in Riga to an Italian (Waldensian) mother and a Jewish-Latvian-Russian father and, similarly to Janeczek, later switched from German (the language spoken in her family) to Italian. Her autobiographical works are being at once rediscovered in Italy and discovered in English translations by Ann Goldstein, like Jarre’s memoir Return to Latvia that I recently reviewed for Reading in Translation. Multilingualism, translation, memory, and migration are only a few keywords that align both Janeczek and Jarre with many writers discussed during the conference “Jewish Literature, World Literature.”

Throughout Allison Schachter and Shai Ginsburg’s panel on “Women’s Internationalism and Jewish World Literature” and “World Literature, Jewish Literature, and the Question of the Law”, each speaker explored their own interpretation of how Jewish literature intersects with other literary types across the globe. The panelists extensively discussed Jewish literature’s niche within the larger scope of world literature, with Schachter emphasizing the instrumental role that female Jewish writers had in challenging gender norms internationally. Shachter examined this phenomenon through the work of Lorraine Hansberry, who was the first black playwright to be featured on Broadway, and who also married a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Schachter emphasized that Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun prompted her to be labeled as a “freedom fighter” with a “Marxist, existentialist ideology”. Schachter also highlighted Hansberry’s grappling with the intersection between European Nazism and American racism with the quote, “Hitler isn’t dead when a black man gets lynched in America”. This quote illustrates an example of Jewish literature as world literature in a grotesque fashion. Schachter also accentuated poet Deborah Vogel’s prose as being “radically equalizing” and said her writing “cuts through the chauvinism of personal subjectivity”. In one such example that Schachter quoted, Vogel writes “one does not need Africa in order to exoticize people”, pointing to European women as a counterexample. Overall, Schachter spotlighted examples of Jewish literature as literary activism, helping to shift towards a more inclusive space for women in the early 20th world literature.

 Ginsburg’s discussion on the panel followed a different route although it contained common threads from Schachter’s focus on women’s internationalism through Jewish literature. Ginsburg focused primarily on Jewish literature and its relation to the rule of law and how Jewish writers have influenced Jewish and global politics in the past century. Ginsburg read passages from S. Y. Agnon’s In the Heart of Seas which resembled a biblical text. Ginsburg highlighted these excerpts, which detail a group of Hasidic Jews making a pilgrimage to the land of Israel, as examples of Jewish literature serving as world literature due to their global and political nature. Possibly my favorite moment of the panel was when Ginsburg and Schachter began to debate whether or not Agnon was respected and followed by the most observant Jews. Schachter argued that Agnon used a “double voice” in his writing and that he was often being somewhat sarcastic while Ginsburg maintained that he was revered by ultra-religious communities. While I have no insight to offer on this matter, this discourse between the two literary experts demonstrated that there is extensive disagreement about literature and that it is never guaranteed to be resolved. Ginsburg’s portion of the panel showed that Jewish literature constitutes as world literature because it prompts political discussion in the region of Palestine, just as Schachter emphasized Jewish literature’s disruptive role in promoting women’s rights. 

I learned that Jewish literature is as multifaceted as the people who produce it. Both Schachter and Ginsburg provided substantial evidence for their claims of Jewish literature as world literature, each in varying ways. The panel was a direct extension of our class discussions about mapping world literature, most evidently in that it discussed Jewish literature in the context of global literature, just as we often do. In addition to this conversation about Jewish literature’s role in global literature, Schachter in particular highlighted Jewish literature as radically modernist through Vogel and Hansberry’s disruptive stance on women’s rights by simply being loud and outspoken. Finally, both Schachter and Ginsburg’s sections of the panel exemplified many of our conversations about mapping Jewishness and Jewish literature over time, with Schachter’s including a modernist aspect as well. Ginsburg’s discussion of Jewish literature as World literature focused on the movement of Jews from Eastern Europe to Palestine, while Schachter monitored the movement of Jewish Modernist literature from Deborah Vogel in Poland to Lorraine Hansberry in the United States. The latter brings together all three aspects of our course’s title. I am left with a few questions about the panel. Firstly, were Jewish female writers the first group to rebel against the confines of heavily male literary circles? And if not, who may have inspired them? Secondly, are there other examples of persecution of Jews in Europe being likened to American racism against blacks besides A Raisin in the Sun? And as a follow-up, how has the literary representation of these systems of oppression affected relations between Jews and Blacks in the United States?

Throughout Allison Schachter and Shai Ginsburg’s panel on “Women’s Internationalism and Jewish World Literature” and “World Literature, Jewish Literature, and the Question of the Law”, each speaker explored their own interpretation of how Jewish literature intersects with other literary types across the globe. The panelists extensively discussed Jewish literature’s niche within the larger scope of world literature, with Schachter emphasizing the instrumental role that female Jewish writers had in challenging gender norms internationally. Shachter examined this phenomenon through the work of Lorraine Hansberry, who was the first black playwright to be featured on Broadway, and who also married a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Schachter emphasized that Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun prompted her to be labeled as a “freedom fighter” with a “Marxist, existentialist ideology”. Schachter also highlighted Hansberry’s grappling with the intersection between European Nazism and American racism with the quote, “Hitler isn’t dead when a black man gets lynched in America”. This quote illustrates an example of Jewish literature as world literature in a grotesque fashion. Schachter also accentuated poet Deborah Vogel’s prose as being “radically equalizing” and said her writing “cuts through the chauvinism of personal subjectivity”. In one such example that Schachter quoted, Vogel writes “one does not need Africa in order to exoticize people”, pointing to European women as a counterexample. Overall, Schachter spotlighted examples of Jewish literature as literary activism, helping to shift towards a more inclusive space for women in the early 20th world literature.

 Ginsburg’s discussion on the panel followed a different route although it contained common threads from Schachter’s focus on women’s internationalism through Jewish literature. Ginsburg focused primarily on Jewish literature and its relation to the rule of law and how Jewish writers have influenced Jewish and global politics in the past century. Ginsburg read passages from S. Y. Agnon’s In the Heart of Seas which resembled a biblical text. Ginsburg highlighted these excerpts, which detail a group of Hasidic Jews making a pilgrimage to the land of Israel, as examples of Jewish literature serving as world literature due to their global and political nature. Possibly my favorite moment of the panel was when Ginsburg and Schachter began to debate whether or not Agnon was respected and followed by the most observant Jews. Schachter argued that Agnon used a “double voice” in his writing and that he was often being somewhat sarcastic while Ginsburg maintained that he was revered by ultra-religious communities. While I have no insight to offer on this matter, this discourse between the two literary experts demonstrated that there is extensive disagreement about literature and that it is never guaranteed to be resolved. Ginsburg’s portion of the panel showed that Jewish literature constitutes world literature because it prompts political discussion in the region of Palestine, just as Schachter emphasized Jewish literature’s disruptive role in promoting women’s rights. 

I learned that Jewish literature is as multifaceted as the people who produce it. Both Schachter and Ginsburg provided substantial evidence for their claims of Jewish literature as world literature, each in varying ways. The panel was a direct extension of our class discussions about mapping world literature, most evidently in that, it discussed Jewish literature in the context of global literature, just as we often do. In addition to this conversation about Jewish literature’s role in global literature, Schachter in particular highlighted Jewish literature as radically modernist through Vogel and Hansberry’s disruptive stance on women’s rights by simply being loud and outspoken. Finally, both Schachter and Ginsburg’s sections of the panel exemplified many of our conversations about mapping Jewishness and Jewish literature over time, with Schachter’s including a modernist aspect as well. Ginsburg’s discussion of Jewish literature as World literature focused on the movement of Jews from Eastern Europe to Palestine, while Schachter monitored the movement of Jewish Modernist literature from Deborah Vogel in Poland to Lorraine Hansberry in the United States. The latter brings together all three aspects of our course’s title. I am left with a few questions about the panel. Firstly, were Jewish female writers the first group to rebel against the confines of heavily male literary circles? And if not, who may have inspired them? Secondly, are there other examples of persecution of Jews in Europe being likened to American racism against blacks besides A Raisin in the Sun? And as a follow-up, how has the literary representation of these systems of oppression affected relations between Jews and Blacks in the United States?

Jewish Literature, World Literature:
A Global Jewish Modernism Conference

Rubenstein Library 249 (Carpenter Room)
Friday, February 10, 2023

10:00-10:30 – welcome

10:30-12:00- panel 1
Allison Schachter (Vanderbilt): Women’s Internationalism and Jewish World Literature
Shai Ginsburg (Duke): World Literature, Jewish Literature, and the Question of the Law

12:00-1:00 – lunch

1:00-2:30 – panel 2
Lital Levy (Princeton): World Literature, Translation, and Diaspora: The Global Journey of Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars
Adi Nester (UNC Chapel Hill): A Nation from Translation: Rudolf Borchardt Between German, Jewish, and World Literature

2:30-3:00 – break

3:00-4:30 – panel 3
Monique Balbuena (University of Oregon): Title TBA
Saskia Ziolkowski (Duke): Modern Jewish Italian Writing as World Literature

4:30-5:00 – closing remarks

A dialogue with Monique Balbuena, Dominika Baran, Lital Levy, and Helen Solterer.
Thursday, February 9, 2023
12:00-2:00pm
Rubenstein Library 249 (Carpenter Room)

The question “What is citizenship?” is evergreen. Though perhaps impossible to “fix” given the complexities of borders, race, class, and the varying intersecting possibilities, the Global Jewish Modernism Lab invited three scholars to engage in conversation around the question as part of the “What is…” dialogue series on Thursday, October 6th, 2022. Troubling the question of citizenship through their intellectual and personal considerations, scholars Mia Fuller (UC Berkeley) and Shai Ginsburg (Duke) joined award-winning Italian author, academic, activist, and journalist Igiaba Scego for her long-awaited return to Duke University after her 2019 visit.

The event’s focus was not to settle the question but for the speakers to share the kinds of inquiries, languages, experiences, and pedagogy that shape their thinking.

First to speak was Shai Ginsburg, who began his presentation by asking the audience to reflect on the thematic question and then read different definitions and etymologies of citizenship for English, French, German, Russian, Middle Eastern languages (Arabic and Turkish), and Persian. Considering how in certain definitions of the word, citizenship means home or country, while in others, it can mean city or land territory, Ginsburg reflected on the ways that within certain cultural and linguistic frameworks, citizenship marks a public realm of responsibility, including demarcating socio-economic standards. Shifting to Hebrew and, more specifically, to the Israeli book of law, Ginsburg shared that in Hebrew, the logic of the word citizen has two meanings in the Bible. While this term does not communicate any social-economic boundaries, it demonstrates the rootedness of a being. In this context, Ginsburg interrogated the processes of exile and rootedness that exist particularly within the Israeli laws of nationality and return – who is seen as belonging, who is seen as returning, and who is considered an outsider.

The University of California, Berkeley’s Mia Fuller began her conversation by sharing how the Covid-19 pandemic changed her thoughts about citizenship. Fuller had attended Scego’s 2019 event, “The Challenge of Being an Afro-Italian Writer,” at Duke, where the writer discussed the power of the passport and its connection to citizenship. Inspired by that conversation, Fuller asked the audience to consider how they use the word citizen, what it means to them, and for whom “citizenship” is a good thing. Fuller shared that given her work as a cultural anthropologist and urban-architectural historian whose research is concerned with the interplays of physical space with political power, she often talks about citizenship with consideration of Italians, especially when speaking about Italy’s colonial and fascist passage. Unraveling Ancient Rome’s influence and how it made it feasible to conceptualize citizenship “Civitas,” Fuller drew out the particular entitlements and freedoms attached to certain citizenships and the alienation attached to others. In her talk, Mia Fuller encouraged the audience to sit with a few questions:

1. Is citizenship changing? Do we understand what citizenship guarantees us? What is citizenship supposed to be, and is it actually that?
2. How does being “American” or holding US citizenship implicate how we talk about other nations’ histories?

In her efforts to trace the diverging nature of citizenship and contemporary understanding of citizenship, Fuller began studying the history of European citizenship and how to become eligible. In the process, she learned that her German great-grandfather, who moved to Holland, did not have to get Dutch identity documents until WWI – the first time that individuals needed to have “regular” status and displaced people became more pronounced. This shift was an outgrowth of the Nuremberg laws, which “denaturalized” – took away the citizenship – of German and Austrian Jews. As the world moves into a moment when citizenship is becoming an element of war; and when the assumption is that every person has a state and has citizenship, Dr. Fuller encouraged attendees to understand that our expectations of citizenship are very much an artifact of the last century and artifacts of the war.

Igiaba Scego began her talk by illustrating the conceptual complexity of both citizenship and the citizen. Being Somali, Italian, and Roman (having grown up in and still living in Rome), Scego establishes that her own liminal identity and the 32-year civil war in Somalia led to a loss of archive. She shared the experience of watching a video recently given to Somalia by Germany of Somali delegates visiting Germany before the civil war. This video shows a scene of young Somalis standing in front of the Berlin wall and lamenting the “shocking impossibilities” of a situation. For the people in the video, the horrors of war were unfathomable. Yet, as Scego points out, the idea of Somali citizenship and what it means to be Somali shifts before, during, and after the dictatorship and after the civil war. At this moment, when Somalia is itself in the liminal space after a civil war but without peace, most Somalis attempt to get to Europe through any means necessary. Many die in the Mediterranean along the way. In all this, borders demarcate who is a citizen and who is not.

Considering her own identity, Scego explained that when one exists in a diaspora, there is great awareness that some of your family remain in your “motherland” without rights, and some are elsewhere trying to gain rights. This rights process can be seen in the dimensions of Italy’s jus sanguinis citizenship policy, which alienates second-generation Italians and renders them foreigners in their own homes. Italy’s citizenship laws create invisibility. Activism for Italian citizenship which leads to an Italian passport, opens the door for people to be seen and to be able to exist in Italy, not as outsiders.

Scego shared that she turns to literature to understand citizenship for herself. Though Italian is not the language of the market, she chose to write in it because Italy is her home, with the language the actual marker of her citizenship. Making this choice to write in Italian is a political assertation of ownership and claiming space. Language and literature allow us to understand the world while also providing a tool for explaining what is happening around us. Wrapping up her conversation, Scego urged those in attendance to consider the power of certain passports and the punishment of others within global contexts. She asked: how are global apartheids reinforced, and how are holders of certain passports, like the Somali passport, rendered as nothing?

A Conversation between Shaul Bassi (Ca’Foscari, University of Venice) and Igiaba Scego (author and visiting scholar at Duke)
Tuesday, October 18, 5:00-7:00pm
FHI Amadieh Family Lecture Hall, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse