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, from old neighbourhood bookshops to new reading circles and specialized workshops for young migrant poets. Moving Words reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions, offering a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 284 pages
Publication date: 30 August 2023
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part due to its reputation as a literary city, where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of 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. Highlighting the differences, tensions, and contradictions of these scenes, this book 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. Along the way, Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and in space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities.

Weight: 430g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781487543693