Thanatic Ethics [Webinar] : Invisible Bodies
Channel: Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities, The Education University of Hong Kong
Date: 2020-12-04

‘Invisible Bodies: Refugees, Undocumented Migrants and Asylum Seekers in Canadian Literature’
Speaker: Srilata Ravi (University of Alberta)

In response to public discourse on refugees, asylum seekers and the undocumented migrants which oscillates between two opposing positions, “humanitarian compassion” and “securitarian anxiety” (Sanyal 2019)1, how do Canadian literary representations of migrant experiences imagine detained and refuge seeking bodies?  How far do these texts go to challenge neo-liberal celebrations of refugee resilience? Do these texts interrogate the very foundations of the legal and political categories used to label  them? Or, is the body of the “literary” refugee merely an aesthetic signifier to render visible the invisible to a curious readership as a way of ethical compensation? Works by Canadian writers, Lawrence Hill, Sharon Bala and Kim Thúy  will be examined to consider these questions.

The Thanatic ethics: the circulation of bodies in migratory spaces Webinar is convened by Bidisha Banerjee (CPCH, The Education University of Hong Kong), Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, Montpellier 3), Thomas Lacroix (MFO)

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Organized by the Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities (CPCH) from 

CPCH is a research centre at The Education University of Hong Kong focusing on popular culture. Popular culture is a cross-disciplinary area that offers considerable potential for research that bridges language and linguistics, literature, culture and new media within the Faculty of Humanities.

The Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities (CPCH) adopts a broad view of popular culture that covers both the culture of everyday life and its mediation through print (newspapers, magazines, literature), multimodal media (music, cinema,photography and advertising, visual and material culture), and new digital media of various kinds. From the perspective of text analysis, research on popular culture goes beyond established canons of traditional European literary works, to explore a wider range of non-traditional media and texts.