Unexpected Encounters: Jewish Women Writers from the Balkans and Latin America
In some aspects of how they are conceptualized in collective imaginations, Latin America and the Balkans are comparable: they both hold the position of “the imagined geography,” as Edward Said wrote of the Orient, both are narrated as the Other from the Anglo-American and Western-European perspective, respectively. Another similarity between the two regions is that they served, across the centuries, as places of Jewish refuge.
How does this specific imagination of the two regions influence women’s creativity today, particularly in writing? What are some of the questions and issues contemporary Jewish women writers face? Where do they stand in relation to national identity discourses, to aspects of their own identities, to languages they write in? How does their marginality — based on religion, ethnicity, gender, sometimes age — influence their standing on the international literary scene? How does it manifest in their writing? Is Jewish women’s creativity always already engaged by definition?
Four women scholars discuss these questions from their diverse disciplines and experiences with and in the regions of Latin America and the Balkans:
- Marjorie Agosín, poet, activist and Jewish literature professor from Chile/USA
- Jelena Filipović & Ivana Vučina Simović, linguists and Jewish Studies scholars from Serbia
- Roberta Maierhofer, American Studies and Aging Studies scholar from Austria
Members of the Styrian Klezmore Orchestra will complement the narrative with music by female Jewish artists. Participants are invited to a cocktail and informal discussion after the event.
For further information, contact Oana Hergenröther
This event is organized by treffpunkt sprachen - Center for Language, Plurilingualism and Didactics in cooperation with the Center for Inter-American Studies and the Field of Excellence “Dimensions of Europe” | University of Graz.