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internationales literaturfestival berlin 2020

In 2020, the cooperation was largely devoted to the connection between digitality and literature. In response to the conditions imposed by the pandemic in autumn 2020, the format of Global Encounters brought together authors from different parts of the world for digital conversations and shared reflection on literature under these conditions. In the encounter, authors including Carmen Maria Machado & Lesley Nneka Arimah, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor & Alvin Pang, Edwidge Danticat as well as Valeria Luiselli & Nadifa Mohamed spoke with one another along shared thematic lines, in an attempt to keep a space for literary exchange open despite the imposed social distance.
A roundtable entitled Don't Touch. Distance And Proximity in Literature and in the Digital Space brought together figures from the world of digital literature. Digital publisher and net activist Christiane Frohmann, literary and media scholar Roberto Simanowski – 2020 Distinguished Visiting Fellow at EXC TC – , Facebook-only author Elisa Aseva, and Sarah Berger, an author navigating between social media, print, and e-books, came together to discuss literature under conditions of digitization, digital forms, writing on social media, and the changing relationship with books.
This engagement with literature under the influence of the digital was joined by readings in the festival's main program, which corresponded with the Cluster’s various research strands: Etgar Keret, Leif Randt and Szczepan Twardoch read from their current novels.

internationales literaturfestival berlin 2019

2019 saw the first cooperation between the Cluster, which began its work at the beginning of the year, and the international literature festival berlin. Titled Third Culture Kids, the events dealt with intercultural mobility and hosted discussions with authors on the topics of privilege and the burdens of socialization in many cultures. Moderated by Toby Ashraf, the authors Chibundu Onuzo, Kaveh Akbar and Michel Faber read from their works and critically discussed the implications of the concept of ‘third culture’ with young scholars from the Cluster. They countered the emphasis on social and cultural mobility with a more nuanced image of interculturality, which differentiated the ‘in-between’ cultures and focused on the structural and political hierarchization of migration movements.
In the children's and youth literature program, the Vietnamese-born U.S. writer Thanhhà Lai presented her coming-of-age novel in verse “Inside Out and Back Again” – a text that tells the painful story of a traumatic escape from the Vietnam war and a difficult, constantly incomplete new beginning in the U.S. from the perspective of a 10-year-old girl.