W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures: Sunčica Klaas

Online Lecture on Zoom

Please register for this hybrid event: evangelia.kindinger@hu-berlin.de

Taking a cue from what Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos describe as the “mobile commons of migration,” my paper explores the intersectionality of childhood, care, and technology in the context of contemporary novels of forced-migration. Following a brief overview of the narrative landscape surrounding the moving child, my inquiry focuses specifically on Valeria Luiselli’s efforts of expanding the circle of representation, responsibility, and care in her novel Lost Children Archive (2019). What interests me, in this sense, is how the novel reimagines the notions of childhood, wellbeing, and responsibility at the junctures of human and technological infrastructures, and how it highlights the intersections between the economies of age, race, and care. Vice-versa, my analysis explores Lusielli’s attempt to query the role of technologies within visions of more progressive geographies and histories of minor mobilities, as her novel uses the railroad to connect different sites and scales of care, while also revealing its ongoing imbrication with histories of forced (im)mobilization.

BIO: Dr. Sunčica Klaas studied American, English and German Studies at the University of Padua, Italy, where she graduated in 2002. From 2005 to 2014, she worked as a research assistant at the American Studies Program at the Humboldt University, Berlin, teaching a variety of courses on American literature and culture. She joined the team of the English and American Studies at the University of Potsdam in 2015.