Tracking Movement – Telling Stories: On the (Narrative) Traces of Refugees in Sherko Fatah’s Onkelchen

Knowledge of the inhabitants of the world is produced by wayfarers following trails of movement, by telling stories about how the paths of the past are complexly bound with others in the present. What type of a wayfarer, then, is the refugee whose movements are highly restricted, whose tracks are frequently imperceptible, and who is all too often unable to tell his or her own story? This talk will explore the narrative problem of the refugee as elaborated in Sherko Fatah‘s novel Onkelchen (2004), which probes the limits of a protagonist‘s effort to retrace the path of a refugee living in Berlin who has been forced to flee the borderland of Turkey and Iraq.
Charlton Payne earned his PhD in German Literature in 2007 at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has been a doctoral fellow of the graduate research group "Figure of the Third", assistant professor and researcher, as well as in 2010 a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study of the Cluster of Excellence "Cultural Foundations of Integration" in Konstanz. From 2011-2013, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Erfurt. He is currently writing a book on refugee narratives in German literature and culture of the 20th-21st centuries. Additional areas of research include the epic, nationality, cosmopolitanism, and asylum in the 18th century. During winter semester 2014/2015, he is a Fellow of the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald. 
Moderation: Professor Dr. Eva Blome