“Neither Meme nor Mammy”: Reimaginations of Diasporic Geocorpographies in Somali British and Somali Swedish Contemporary Literature

Lecturer
Sheila Ghose is Senior Lecturer in English literature at Södertörn University. Her recent scholarship focuses on the nexus between refugee studies, human rights, and life writing. Previously, she has worked on a study of privileged authors’ use of fake memoirs and plagiarized novels to claim minority and postcolonial subjectivities. In addition, she has published on British Asian literature. She is co-editor of the collection Refugee Genres: Essays on the Culture of Flight and Refugee.

Title
“Neither Meme nor Mammy”: Reimaginations of Diasporic Geocorpographies in Somali British and Somali Swedish Contemporary Literature

Abstract
This talk discusses migrant experiences, including refugeedom, as depicted in works of young writers of the Somali British and Somali Swedish diasporas. Writers include Somali British poets Momtaza Mehri and Warshan Shire, and short story writer and artist Diriye Osman, as well as Somali Swedish poets Sakariya Hirshi and Yusuf Hussein, and artist, filmmaker and author Sala Hilowle. The paper investigates these writers’ mixing of media, such as social media, pop music, short films, visual art and literary genres like poetry and the short story. It centers on the question of form to explore diasporic aspects of what Joseph Pugliese terms geocorpographies; in his words, “the violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within the geopolitics of race, war and empire.” In doing so, the paper takes into consideration the differences between the Somali British and Somali Swedish contexts, in terms of history, language, publishing venues and marketing, but also explores the interconnections between them, such as the focus on urban violence and its effects. The paper investigates the ways in which the writers use the mixing of art forms to represent racialized bodies, those of refugees and of the victims or perpetrators of shootings, and to reimagine and celebrate diasporic black bodies.

Information
The seminar will be held in English. 

Please send an email to concurrences@lnu.se if you want to participate via Zoom. 

Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies