Conversations and their afterlife

“Seen as Friendly, Seen as Frightening?”, a research interview I held with novelist Mithu Sanyal is now out in Rewriting Identities in Contemporary Germany, a joint volume edited by Selma Rezgui, Laura Marie Sturtz and Tara Talwar Windsor. Our conversation is available in open access and the entire book is very worth ordering to your library if you can! It features additional interviews with Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo, Özlem Özgül Dündar and Sasha Marianna Salzmann as well as essays on the works of Fatma Aydemir, Shida Bazyar, Asal Dardan, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Antje Rávik Strubel, Noah Sow, Jackie Thomae, and Olivia Wenzel.

When Sanyal and I were in conversation in early 2023, we discussed, among other things, the process of writing her second novel on the Indian anticolonial struggle and of anticipating reactions to it. Coincidence had it that the novel and the interview were now published at the same time and it has been remarkable to read reception to the former in light of the latter. Besides praise and a German Book Prize nomination, one reviewer, for instance, complains that the text takes a didactic approach to anticolonial history. As didacticism is a central notion in my research (especially in the context of fiction that addresses often-excluded perspectives), Sanyal and I talked about its possible meanings – and about the challenge of convincing German audiences that thinking about colonial histories on a wider scale has anything to do with them, e.g. here:

The unproductive antipathy towards the mere word “postcolonial” in the German mediascape that Sanyal identifies in the answer above has only become more apparent in the time since we held the interview. I will discuss these dynamics and the discussions around the new novel in depth in an upcoming academic paper.

For now, I’d like to share my joy that the afterword to Antichristie highlights the importance of a previous conversation – one between Sanyal, British playwright Vinay Patel and myself that I organised at King’s College London in May 2019 and that ended up inspiring a major plot line in the novel (see image below). In comparison to my text-focused PhD project on India and Germany, this second research project focuses much more on collaborations and conversations – not all of which can be recorded and published. It is wonderful to be reminded that even seemingly ephemeral events have their own lasting afterlives.