Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational European Literatures

This project studies how questions of cultural memory and the environment are explored in contemporary European cultures through the medium of transnational literature. In our postmigratory societies cultural memory is often divisive: people clash over their different linguistic, cultural or religious heritage. The recent pandemic, but even more the intensification of climate crisis, has raised our awareness about planetary connectedness. The project innovates methodologically in bringing together transnational memory studies, environmental humanities and ecocriticism to inquire how transnational authors explore the intersection of diverse violent postcolonial and postimperial histories and their environmental impact in different cultures in Europe. We investigate how literature experiments with genre and translingual practices to represent the non-human scale of environmental change and to imagine human subjects in a new way as enmeshed transcorporeally in their environment.