We are happy to invite you to a guest lecture for our Work-in-Progress Lecture series on Friday, November 1 2024, at 6 PM Bucharest time. You can find all the details below.
November 1 2024, 6 to 8 pm (online via google meet) WiP#1 Guest Lecture: Atalie Gerhard (Lecturer at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, PhD candidate at SaarlandUniversity), Decolonial Feminist Futurity in Contemporary Novels by First Nations Women
Abstract: This talk presents decolonial feminist imaginations of futurity in selected contemporary novels by First Nations women from what is now Canada. Firstly, I show how the autobiographical novel Split Tooth (2018) by the throat singer Tanya Tagaq (Inuit) and the graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo (2017-2021) by the novelist Katherena Vermette (Métis) depict Indigenous girls reclaiming their self-images through intergenerational connectedness.1 In Split Tooth, the heroine transforms from a nameless teenage mother who is a victim of abuse to a gatekeeper of the afterlife with cosmic powers. Such decolonial futures are pursued through Tagaq’s deployment of magical realist aesthetics to interweave recollections of her Arctic childhood with her imagination of an ennobling posthumous reunification with ancestors to collectively shape her people’s future. Thereby, Tagaq’s landbased spirituality subverts the loss of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) as well as Eurochristian dichotomies of heaven and hell while re-incorporating the spirit world into pan-Indigenous cosmological balance. In A Girl Called Echo, the protagonist finds herself separated from her mother but called upon by her ancestors to join their resistance across space and time. Vermette’s illustrated time travels of a Métis teenager posit revitalized revolutionary thought as the consequence of her firsthand witnessing of the history of her people in what are now Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Secondly, I discuss how in non-speculative fiction, pan-Indigenous beliefs in transtemporality both call for and are reflected in decolonial feminist healing practices, as represented in the novelsBirdie (2015) by Tracey Lindberg (Cree) and The Break (2016) by Katharena Vermette (Métis).2 Significantly, the plots are organized around Indigenous teenage girls who are bedridden while struggling to recover from sexual abuse that devastated them personally but is also cyclical within their communities, as the polyphonic flashbacks reveal.
However, both protagonists are supported by multiple generations of women under whose care their bodies remain weakened, but their political investment in Indigenous futurities increases. Yet, besides advocating interconnectedness, such decolonial feminist healing requires engaged listening practices among Indigenous women and girls whose trauma risks being pathologized to the point of legitimating paternalistic state interventions. Against this backdrop, readings of selected passages from Birdie and The Break will trace how aesthetics of wounding in the past and healing for the future visualize psychological decolonization as a personal and political response to intergenerational trauma in the wake of cultural genocide, residential schooling, and the ongoing epidemic of MMIWG.
1 The first section of my talk features ideas expressed in my upcoming book chapter “AlterNative Afterlives in Decolonial Feminist Dimensions in Split Tooth (2018) and A Girl Called Echo (2017- 2021)” set to appear in the volume Indigenous North American Futurities in Literature, Media, and Museums, edited by Birgit Däwes and Bethany Webster-Parmentier (University of Flensburg).
2 The second section of my talk includes ideas expressed in my book chapter “Transcending Trauma: Decolonial Feminist Healing in the Novels Birdie (2015) by Tracey Lindberg and The Break (2016) by Katharena Vermette” which has appeared in 2024 in the volume Narrating, Representing, Reflecting ‘Disability’: 21st Century ‘American’ Perspectives, edited by Wilfried Raussert and Sarah-Lena Essifi (Bielefeld University).
Bio: Atalie Gerhard is a Lecturer at the University of Jena and Doctoral Candidate at Saarland University as an alumna of the International Research Training Group “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces.” She taught at the University of Tübingen and Paderborn University and lectured at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Potsdam. She joined the German Association for American Studies and the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries. Her publications appeared in Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (2022), Exploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture (2018), and American Multiculturalism in Context: Views from at Home and Abroad (2017) and the Journal of American Studies of Turkey, the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, [Inter]sections – The American Studies Journal at the University of Bucharest, American Studies in Scandinavia, and The International Review of African American Art. She holds a Master of Arts in North American Studies: Culture and Literature and a double Bachelor of Arts in English and American and French Studies from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg where she was a student research assistant and interim secretary. She speaks German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Arabic on various levels.
