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The Cemetery of the Companionless: Towards a World Literature of Undocumented Lives in Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World

Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (Amerikanistik, Uni Mainz)
​Lecture by Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (American Studies, Mainz University)
29.01.2021, 18:15 Uhr
Elif Shafak’s 2019 novel 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World revolves around a cemetery on the outskirts of Istanbul. The aim of this cemetery, which is called the cemetery of the companionless, is literally a “prevention through deterrence”: The inhumanity of the state manifests itself in punishing those who transgress its mandates even beyond their own death. The absence of a proper burial and hence of the right to recognition is epitomized by the absence of human decency. On this cemetery of the companionless, there are numbers, not names. The feat which Shafak’s novel accomplishes, then, is that it carefully chronicles the lives and the identities of all those who have been buried on the cemetery of the companionless: from transgender men and women to political prisoners and undocumented migrants. Drawing on Katja Sarkowsky’s and Marcus Llanque’s recent work, this paper argues that the politics of burial are at the core of state-sanctioned violence against undocumented migration. Ultimately, I argue that we need a world literature of undocumented migration (Damrosh 2003): a framework which enables us to link Shafak’s novel to Jason de León’s “Hostile Terrain” (De León 2015). In both these instances, nations police their boundaries by tacitly accepting the deaths of those who risk their lives trying to cross national borders. The punishment for such transgression can be said to continue even beyond the migrants’ death. Conversely, literature, art and anthropology can restore to these lives the decency denied to them by the nation-state: the right to both a proper burial and transnational recognition.

Works Cited
Shafak, Elif. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World. London: Viking, 2019.
Damrosh, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Berkeley: U of California P, 2015.

Über | About

Mita Banerjee is Professor of American Studies at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Mainz University. Her research interests include postcolonial literature (The Chutneyfication of History, 2002), ethnic American literature and culture (Race-ing the Century, 2005), the American Renaissance (Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth- Century American Literature, 2008), issues of naturalization and citizenship (Color Me White: Naturalism/Naturalization in American Literature, 2013), and medical humanities (Medical Humanities in American Studies, 2018). She is co-speaker of the research training group “Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience,” which is funded by the German Research Foundation. Her book on “Biological Humanities” is forthcoming from Winter University Press.

Read more: www.obama-institute.com/banerjee/

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