B. Venkat Mani

Rehearsing Acquired Privileges: The Nonnative Informant and Didactics of Difference

This article surmises the position and ambition of a nonnative speaker/teacher of a European language and literature as an ostensible facilitator of cultural difference in the U.S. foreign-language classroom. The paper opens a space to think through pedagogical conceptuality and the practice of assisting and guiding students in their perceptions of cultural difference in the specific situation when the instructor carries visible inscriptions of his/her “Otherness.” Through an investigation of the adjectives “native” and “non-native,” the article critically reconsiders privileges of birth, affiliations through residence, education, and ethnicity. This article sutures two different streams of scholarship. First, by engaging with scholarship on German as a foreign language in the U.S., the article construes the “position” of the nonnative speaker vis-à-vis the native speaker/instructor. Next, through a discussion with cultural theorists, the article puts to test the “ambition” of the nonnative-minority as an allegedly reliable native informant of interculturality.

Multilingual Code-Stitching in Ultraminor World Literatures: Reading Abhimanyu Unnuth’s Lāla Pasīnā (1977) with Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008)

This essay explores strategies of world literary comparison when ultraminor literatures are juxtaposed with dominant literary traditions such as the global Anglophone. By bringing an English and a Hindi novel in conversation, the essay underlines their “multilingual” composition, whereby one language becomes a vehicle for several other languages, dialects, sociolects, regional linguistic variations and creole, thus calling for a new critical framework of evaluation within the national and the world-literary sphere. The essay engages with a new theoretical term in world literary studies, “ultraminor literature” in order to re-evaluate two other terms: the “great unread,” and the “untranslatable.” The essay argues that the idea of “untranslatability” denies any room for multi-locational and multilingual histories of linguistic traditions. Furthermore, untranslatability creates hierarchies of readerships and access, which can be confronted by engaging with linguistic code-stitching and the multilingual composition of ultraminor literatures.

The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature. Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (review)

historical web of responsibility. The second chapter explores theoretical concepts of memory as developed, in particular, by Jan and Aleida Assmann. While Eigler is generally positive about the Assmanns’ contribution to the theory of memory as a collective phenomenon, she nevertheless sees their concept of long-term historical memory as too rigid and illiberal. She suggests that the Assmanns’ concept needs to be opened up to include more liberal and multiethnic notions of identity and nationhood. I fi nd this discussion and critique quite fascinating; my primary criticism is that Eigler does not always differentiate between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to identity and collective memory formation. One may agree with Eigler’s arguments for liberal, multicultural identities but nevertheless concede that such arguments are prescriptive and not descriptive: that is, they lay out a path that the Germans as a collective entity ought perhaps to take, but they do not necessarily describe what the Germans as a collective entity are in fact doing. Eigler also speaks positively about the destruction of “sinnstiftende Gedächtnisdiskurse” (56) but it is not entirely clear what the elimination of meaning in discourses about memory might actually lead to; and Eigler’s literary analyses suggest that authors are not necessarily destroying meaning but rather problematizing it. Eigler’s analysis of these novels, and of their contribution to contemporary German discourses about memory and identity, is an important and well-researched contribution on a subject that will almost certainly continue to be of great interest to German Studies scholars for many years to come.