HMKK03625U Moderne Kultur: Kulturhistorie: forløb 2: Migrationens kulturelle aftryk. Identiteter, historier og tilhørsforhold i forandringer

In the 20th and 21st centuries, a growing number of people have left their homes to cross state borders and settle in another country. No matter whether they have moved in search of a better life or been forcibly displaced by war, destitution, persecution or environmental disaster, they have contributed to the pluralisation and hybridisation of cultures and identities in receiving countries. Adopting migrant, postcolonial and feminist perspectives, this course examines how contemporary artists and cultural producers have grappled with these transformations and the conflicts and issues they have brought to the fore, particularly in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, which spurred a wealth of artistic and activist responses to European border policies and the predicament of refugees and irregular migrants.

Furthermore, the course introduces a postmigrant perspective to situate artistic work within encompassing societal and historical processes of transformation. The concept of postmigration does not refer to a societal state of affairs in which migration has ended, but to a set of problematics and struggles over identity, history and belonging – as well as racialisation, marginalisation and inequality – originating in the obsession with migration, migrants and migrantising discourses which permeates contemporary European societies.

The course aims to deepen insight into the transitional effects of migration as well as honing students’ methodological competencies in analysing artistic and cultural phenomena that can be viewed as the result of the confluence of different cultures blending together, or which spotlight the fault lines of ‘multicultural’ societies or issues of refugeedom. To this end, we will engage with some key concepts and theories relevant to the study of a broad range of cultural and artistic phenomena: migration and postmigration, (trans-)cultural identity and belonging, collective memory and (imagined) community, racialisation and whiteness, gender and sexual nationalism, hybridisation and cultural translation. We will read texts by scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Parvati Nair, Ann Phoenix, Stuart Hall, T.J. Demos and Kobena Mercer. Indicative artists/projects include Ai Weiwei, Isaac Julien, Jeannette Ehlers, Superflex and Zadie Smith.

The purpose of the course is to give students the necessary skills to carry out an independent, in-depth contextual analysis of cultural-historical phenomena related to the course topic. The course starts out by introducing a historical and methodological frame for understanding the interrelations between migration and culture. The remainder of the course revolves around two contemporary sub-topics and the students’ analytical work on source material selected by themselves in relation to these topics (texts, artworks, cultural phenomena). The first sub-topic concerns issues of community, identity and new narratives of belonging in ‘the postmigrant condition’; the second sub-topic centres upon cultural and artistic responses to the 2015 refugee crisis and on questions of borders, citizenship, agency and othering. Furthermore, students are also trained in organising, structuring and implementing a collaboration process as the collections of source material are prepared in groups