Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin

Berlin has become a global city due to its reputation as a literary city, with many contexts in which life is made literary. Moving Words explores the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths, offering a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and space.

Format: Hardback
Length: 284 pages
Publication date: 25 July 2023
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in recent decades, largely due to its reputation as a literary city. Moving Words explores the various contexts in which life in Berlin is made literary, from old neighbourhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. It reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migration. Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, rich historical archives, and literary analysis, Moving Words examines the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths. Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities.

Weight: 520g
Dimension: 235 x 159 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781487543686