Jun.-Prof. Dr. Magdalena Pfalzgraf
Investigator
Institute of English, American and Celtic Studies
Rabinstraße 8
D-53111 Bonn
Phone: +49 228 73 82038
pfalzgraf@uni-bonn.de
Academic Profile
Since Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789), African writing in English has linked experiences of SAD and inequality to depictions of movement. This connection endures and has been connected to questions of ownership, including the control over economic resources, political power, and the autonomy of human beings. From the history of slavery, marked by forced displacement and movement restriction in its severest form, to colonial land seizures, (forced) labor migration during industrialization, and the policing of urban movements of the colonized under apartheid, movement and SAD have coincided in Africa's Anglophone literatures in seemingly paradox ways: Often, mobility happens not despite, but because of SAD. These dynamics continue in more recent times, in particular where policing of movement, sequestration of space, and informalization of economies under authoritarian post-independence regimes are concerned. This project takes a diachronic perspective on African literary mobility dynamics and their entanglement with SAD. In order to understand not only mobility in literature but also of literature, it employs the term literary economy, which includes infrastructures in which texts emerge and circulate. It develops literary mobility studies by considering the component of SAD and proposes countermobility as a form of agency, thus moving beyond received postcolonial approaches.
This project aims at exploring literary mobility dynamics within contexts of SAD in Anglophone African literature from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It builds on mobility research in literary studies and the social sciences and extends its scope to encompass SAD studies. Employing a literary-historical and narratological approach, it tests the thesis that countermobility is literary mode of agency which has endured across centuries.
PhD in New English Literatures and Cultures , University of Frankfurt, Germany
2005–2011
First State Examination in German Studies and English Studies, RWTH Aachen, Germany
Junior Professor of English Literatures and Cultures, University of Bonn, Germany
2022–2023
Postdoctoral Researcher and Coordinator International PhD Programme "Literary and Cultural Studies," Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC), University of Gießen, Germany
2019–2022
Research Associate, Department of English, Saarland University Saarbrücken, Germany
2016
Research Stay at Harare, Zimbabwe
2015–2022
Adjunct Faculty, University of Frankfurt, Germany
2014
Research Stays at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Harare, Zimbabwe
- Mobility and Literature
- Music and Literature
- African Literature in English
- Transculturality and Literature
- World Anglophone Studies / World Literature
- Rethinking the Order of Time. Interdisciplinary Research Network (ReOTi network)
- Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien / Association of Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS)
- Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Afrikawissenschaften / Center for Interdisciplinary African Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt (ZIAF)
- The European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS)
- Alumniverein der Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes / Alumni Association of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation
- 2024. As editor. With S. Anastasijevic and H. Teichler. The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature: Transcultural Engagements, Global Frictions. Bloomsbury.
- 2024. With H. Teichler. "Introduction: The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature - The Mobilizing Potential of Transcultural World Literature." In The Many Worlds
of Anglophone Literature, edited by S. Anastasijevic, M. Pfalzgraf, and H. Teichler, 1–31. Bloomsbury. - 2023. "World Literary Citizenship in Anglophone African Novels: Self-Perception and Afropolitan Globality in Sefi Atta's A Bit of Difference (2012) and Valerie Tagwira's Trapped (2020)." In The Anglophone Novel in the Twenty-First Century. Cultural Contexts – Literary Developments – Model Interpretations, edited by N. Butt, A. Scherr, and A. Nünning, 101–119.
- 2023. "The Lion became a Historian. Some Thoughts on Memory, History, and Storytelling." In Memories of Diversity – Diversity of Memory, edited by A.M. Fellner and L. McFalls, 15–27. Waxmann Verlag.
- 2022. With A.M. Fellner and H.-J. Lüsebrink. "Aufklärung(en) und (Post)Kolonialismus – Einleitung." In Aufklärungen: Strategien und Kontroversen vom 17. bis 21. Jahrhundert, edited by J. Birgfeld, S. Catani, and A. Conrad, in collab. with S. Mehrbrey, 421–428. Universitätsverlag Winter.
- 2022. With A.M. Fellner. "Sexuelle Begegnungen im Pazifik: Alternatives Körperwissen und fluide Geschlechter." In Aufklärungen: Strategien und Kontroversen vom 17. bis 21. Jahrhundert, edited by J. Birgfeld, S. Catani, and A. Conrad in collab. with S.Mehrbrey, 523–440. Universitätsverlag Winter.
- 2021. Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English: Crossing Borders, Transcending Boundaries. Routledge.
- 2021. "Flânerie in Valerie Tagwira's The Uncertainty of Hope (2006)." In Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 58(2): 18–28.
- 2020. "Walking Cities, Conquering Pavements. Foreword." Foreword to Because Sadness Is Beautiful? Poems, by T. Chidora Harare, ix–xii. Mwanaka Media and Publishing.
- 2019. As editor. With S. Anastasijevic and H. Teichler. Moving Centers & Traveling Cultures. Special Issue of Kairos. A Journal of Critical Symposium 4(1).
- 2019. "Representations of White Zimbabwean Mobilities in Recent Anglophone Fiction Graham Lang's Lettah's Gift (2011) and Ian Holding's Of Beasts & Beings (2010)." In Mobility and Minorities in Africa, edited by M. Carboni and G. Sistu, 235–257. Aracne.
- 2019. With S. Anastasijevic and H. Teichler. "Moving Centers & Traveling Cultures: Readings in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures." In Moving Centers & Traveling Cultures. Special Issue of Kairos. A Journal of Critical Symposium 4(1): 1–8.