Johan Schimanski

Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke, eds. Transforming Author Museums: From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs. New York: Berghahn, 2022. 

Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman, eds. Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021.

Johan Schimanski. Grenzungen: Versuche zu einer Poetik der Grenze. Trans. G. H. H. Wien: Turia + Kant, 2020. 

Knut Stene-Johansen, Christian Refsum and Johan Schimanski, eds.
Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community. Bielefeld: transcript, 2018.

Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe, eds. Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections. New York: Berghahn, 2017.

Johan Schimanski and Ulrike Spring. Passagiere des Eises: Polarhelden und arktische Diskurse 1874. Wien: Böhlau, 2015.

Johan Schimanski, Cathrine Theodorsen and Henning Howlid Wærp, eds. Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis. Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk, 2011.

Anka Ryall, Johan Schimanski and Henning Howlid Wærp, eds. Arctic Discourses. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.

Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, eds. Border Poetics De-limited. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007.  

• Schimanski, Johan (2024). Space, Borders and Cognition in Urban Postmigration Literature. In Garcia, Patricia & Toivonen, Anna-Leena (Ed.), Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9783031427978. p. 235–258. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-42798-5_11. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Borders are central to the urban postmigratory experience in divided cities. How do we use literary texts to make sense of borders, borderings and border experiences? This chapter argues that combining border poetics analysis with a cognitive approach will help us understand this question, pointing to how narratives not only describe urban borders but also act them out by using their own formal borders to involve readers. The chapter takes as its departure point a poem addressing urban spaces by Sarah Zahid, who grew up in Oslo as the child of Pakistani parents. It maps the poem onto the geographical and bordered spaces of Oslo, and these threshold spaces on to the bordered textual space of the poem, with a focus on how border crossings in the world of its speaker-protagonist and in its textual techniques involve various kinds of embodiment, movement, and cognition. It draws not only on 4E cognitive approaches (around Embodiment, Enactment, Extension, and Embeddedness) involving predictive processing, emotion, and kinesic cues, but also cognitive approaches to urban borders in recent work by James W. Scott, building on the psycho-semiotic approach of Luca Tateo and Giuseppina Marsico.

• Schimanski, Johan (2024). A Border Poetics of Migration: Five Mappings of Migration Literature in Norwegian and Swedish. In Stan, Corina & Sussman, Charlotte (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9783031307836. p. 77–93. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_6. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Borders and border-crossings of different kinds are central to narratives of migration. This chapter uses examples from Norwegian and Swedish language novels and poetry to show how borders figure in migration and postmigration literature. It argues that developments in interdisciplinary border studies, border poetics, and border aesthetics provide conceptual tools for understanding borders negotiated by migrants on different spatial and symbolic planes. The texts examined can be divided into two strands, one consisting of works focusing on migration from one country to another, the other of works about postmigratory urban youth negotiating the spatial and symbolic borders of cities such as Oslo or Stockholm. The chapter concentrates in turn on each of the five border dimensions proposed in border poetics, not only the topographical and the symbolic, but also their variants the temporal, the epistemological, and the textual. It argues that textual borders are central to an understanding of how migrant and postmigrant experiences cross the epistemological borders of the public sphere. Along the way it discusses aerial borders, family stories, photographs, and multiethnic sociolects as they appear in the material. The chapter also suggests the emergence of a third strand of writing that could be labeled activist poetry. Texts discussed in more detail include novels and poetry by Maria Amelie, Athena Farrokhzad, Amal Aden, Gulraiz Sharif, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Sarah Zahid, Johannes Anyuru, Sarah Azmeh Rasmussen, and Romeo Gill.

• Schimanski, Johan (2024). Border Temporalities, Temporal Borders: Migratory Border-Crossings in Literature and Other Discourses. In Nyman, Jopi; Schimanski, Johan & Llena, Carmen Zamorano (Ed.), Temporalities and Subjectivities in Migration Literature in Europe. Lexington Books. ISSN 9781666945027. p. 17–34. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Temporalities and Subjectivities in Migration Literature in Europe examines migrant stories through the lens of temporality as seen in the role of such issues as integration, waiting, detention, trauma, crisis, and imagined futures. This book argues that a focus on different time scales and perceptions of time will help us understand how the intimate and affective subjectivities of more complex narratives of migration, as articulated in literature, cross into the public sphere and challenge political 'bubbles.' This collection showcases new approaches to and innovative readings of different forms of literary and cultural migration narratives. In addition to developing theoretical tools for the study, the authors present innovative case studies addressing topics such as the European refugee crisis, migration narratives and border crossings in Britain, Spain, and Morocco, as well as experiences of migration in Finland and Norway

• Schimanski, Johan (2022). Can Migration Narratives Change Public Conceptions of Borders? The Somali-Norwegian Borderscape in Roda Ahmed’s Forberedelsen and Its Medial Reception. In Ortega, Nelson Arturo Gonzalez & García, Ana Belén Martínez (Ed.), Representing 21st-Century Migration in Europe: Performing Borders, Identities and Texts. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781800733800. p. 71–88. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This chapter aims to investigate the role of literary reception as an impact on migration literature in the Norwegian public sphere. The chapter compares how border concepts are expressed in Roda Ahmed’s novel of migration from Somalia to Norway, as compared to how they appear in the media commentary of the book in the form of literary reviews. It also analyses the book’s cover or paratexts as placed on the border between the novel and its reception. From four core sets of concepts required by editors, the author deals mainly with “performative acts”, “metaphor / metonymy” and “border aesthetics”.

• Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Aarbakke, Thea (2022). Introduction: The Expanded Spaces and Changing Contexts of Author Museums. In Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Aarbakke, Thea (Ed.), Transforming author museums From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781800732438. p. 1–32. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Aarbakke, Thea (2022). Author Museums and Democratization. In Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Aarbakke, Thea (Ed.), Transforming author museums From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781800732438. p. 320–326. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2022). Ghostly Voices in the Author Museum. In Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Aarbakke, Thea (Ed.), Transforming author museums From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781800732438. p. 105–135. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Nyman, Jopi (2021). Border Images and Narratives: Paradoxes, Spheres, Aesthetics. In Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Nyman, Jopi (Ed.), Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings. Manchester University Press. ISSN 9781526146267. p. 242–251. doi: 10.7765/9781526146274.00021. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This chapter written by the editors examines how the individual contributions to this volume answer the book’s three basic questions about different aesthetic strategies, how they enable crossings from private experience into the public sphere, and the various paradoxes they involve. The ways in which they answer these questions connect the different chapters with each other. Here the editors also suggest possible ways forward for future research, or themes that need a closer focus. It is argued that, in addition to the need to broaden the focus to other forms of aesthetic experience than those prototypically characterised as ‘images’ and ‘narratives’, it is crucial to examine in more detail how border images and narratives act in the world, focus on the temporalities of such images and narratives, and also explore their emotional dimensions.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Nyman, Jopi (2021). Images and Narratives on the Border. In Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Nyman, Jopi (Ed.), Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings. Manchester University Press. ISSN 9781526146267. p. 1–20. doi: 10.7765/9781526146274.0000. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This introduction addresses the role of the aesthetic forms such as narratives and images for politics of the border on the basis of the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière. It also suggests that stories of the border are means for negotiating identity in the borderscape, the site where border-crossings and bordering processes take place, generating new belongings and becomings, as the border theorist Chiara Brambilla argues. Providing a shared basis for the interdisciplinary volume, the introduction asks three key questions that concern (1) the role of the form, medium, aesthetical strategies in (trans)forming the borderscape, (2) their entry into the public sphere and diverse functions in border discourses and (3) their role in making visible and giving voice to diverse experiences of the borderscape, including those of migrants and other minorities. The introduction also reviews the case studies collected in the volume.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2021). Seasons of Migration to the North: Borders and Images in Migration Narratives Published in Norwegian. In Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Nyman, Jopi (Ed.), Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings. Manchester University Press. ISSN 9781526146267. p. 206–224. doi: 10.7765/9781526146274.00019. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This chapter brings together the concerns of border aesthetics and ‘post-national’ imagology. Setting out to map images of Northernness in contemporary migrant literature that features viewpoints originating from the global ‘South’, it discusses the border processes implied by stereotypical images of the other and of the self. It addresses a number of fictional or autobiographical public narratives written in Norwegian by migrants arriving in Norway as children or young adults, including testimonial narratives by the child refugee Amal Aden and ‘illegal’ migrant Maria Amelie, along with semi-autobiographical novels by Romeo Gill and Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Migrant narratives negotiate discourses of arcticity, winterliness, nordicity etc., known from imagological research on Northernness. The chapter asks to what degree various topoi of Northernness contribute to the bordering processes in the texts, or whether these narratives produce new images of Northernness and new vocabularies for addressing the border-crossing. The narratives deploy chiastic switchings between North and South, circling disorientations, entropic white-outs and liberating and destructive verticalities in order to figure the border in new ways at different points of their physical and symbolic journeys. The ambivalence of these images shows that they are related not merely to borders but also to the epistemological borders negotiated.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2021). Border Utopias, Border Dystopias. In Faber, Vera & Seidl, Barbara (Ed.), Grenzüberschreitungen und Grenzüberschreibungen in Theorie, Literatur und Kultur. Praesens Verlag. ISSN 9783706911207. p. 45–78. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Utopias have usually been imagined as being separated in time and space from our contemporary societies. But if utopias seem to require borders conceived of as divides, what would be the utopian concept of a border be? Why has migration figured so little in previous utopias, and what would a utopian form of migration be like? Borders in the world today are ethically and socially dysfunctional, crying out for new solutions. This chapter weaves theories of utopia, nations, borders, migration and science fiction into readings of fiction and poetry by Roda Ahmed, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ursula K. Le Guin and Mohsin Hamid. It argues that border utopias are necessary if we are to understand the epistemological limitations underlying current border practices and the possibility of new border imaginings.

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). Hva kommuniseres i forfattermuseer? Nordisk Museologi. ISSN 1103-8152. 28(1), p. 23–41. doi: 10.5617/nm.7965. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Writers’ museums often privilege the biographical person of the author rather than their literary works. Here we present a model which can be used not only as a method of analysis, but also as as an inspiration that can help create productive tensions in the exhibition of biography and works in author museums. Our departure point is that the writer’s museum is a double act of communication, or more precisely a museal act of communication about a literary act of communication. Using Roman Jakobson’s model of the communicative act, we show how museums make visible or hide different parts of the communications network, as well as what complicates this network. We use examples from the Strindberg Museum in Stockholm throughout to make an abstract argument more concrete, referring to other museums and exhibitions to provide breadth where solutions and traditions are concerned.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). Playing the Arctic: Arthur Ransome’s Winter Holiday. In Hansson, Heidi; Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren & Ryall, Anka (Ed.), The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults. Routledge. ISSN 9780367360801. p. 189–202. doi: 10.4324/9780429343704. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Inspired by Nansen’s accounts of Arctic journeys, the child protagonists of Arthur Ransome’s Winter Holiday (1933) transform the English lake on which they spend their holidays into the scene of an Arctic expedition. This chapter examines how Winter Holiday uses Arctic discourse to articulate shifts in imperialism and gender roles leading up to inter-war modernity. The novel’s disjunctive mappings of the Lake District onto spaces of exploration, along with the fantasy play within the fiction, produce an ambivalence about imperialism; its adventures and entropic images of the fluidity of the ice and the blizzard create a modernist Arctic.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike (2020). The Arctic, Germany and Austria-Hungary: Narrative Borders in Discourses around the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition (1872–1874), German Representations of the Far North (17th-19th Centuries): Writing the Arctic. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISSN 9781527560222. p. 246–267. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Migratory Angels: The Political Aesthetics of Border Trauma. In Horsti, Karina (Eds.), The Politics of Public Memories of Forced Migration and Bordering in Europe. Palgrave Pivot. ISSN 9783030305642. p. 37–52. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-30565-9_3. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Post-traumatic conditions are the result of wounds crossing bodily or psychic borders. At the same time, crossing territorial borders can cause traumas. How do migration narratives figure the traumatic effects of border-crossings? To answer this question, I apply a border aesthetics approach, arguing that the borderings of what may be sensed (cf. Jacques Rancière’s concept of the partage de sensible, the “distribution of the sensible”) in the borderscapes of migration narratives are often regulated by the epistemological borderings that take place in the fixations, substitutions and blind spots of trauma. I suggest that migration literature can combine different styles of presentation—for example, images and narrative—in order to create new forms of political aesthetics and counteract the desensitizing logic of media spectacle.

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). The Melting Archive: The Arctic and the Archive’s Others. In Frank, Susi K. & Jakobsen, Kjetil Ansgar (Ed.), Arctic Archives: Ice, Memory and Entropy. Transcript Verlag. ISSN 9783837646566. p. 49–68. doi: 10.14361/9783839446560-005. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This volume explores the Arctic as an important and highly endangered archive of knowledge about natural as well as human history of the Anthropocene. Focusing on the Arctic as an archive means not only to investigate it as a place of human history and memory―of Arctic exploring, conquering, and colonizing―but to take into account also the specific environmental conditions of the circumpolar region: ice and permafrost. These have allowed a huge natural archive to emerge, offering rich sources for natural scientists and historians alike. Examining the debate on the notion of (“natural”) archive, the cultural semantics and historicity of the meaning of concepts like “warm,” “cold,” “freezing,” and “melting,” as well as various works of literature, art, and science on Arctic topics, this volume brings together literary scholars, historians of knowledge and philosophy, art historians, media theorists, and archivologists. Contributions relate the ice of the Arctic to other memory media in nature and culture, like snow and ice, earth and stone, but also film, photography and text; in the context of the melting archives of the Arctic. What kind of memory supports do these different media supply? What kind of events are preserved in ice, for example compared to earth, and what is discarded, and what information is provided when entropy rises?

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Reading the Future North. In Larsen, Janike Kampevold & Hemmersam, Peter (Ed.), Future North : The Changing Arctic Landscapes. Routledge. ISSN 9781472481252. p. 16–25. doi: 10.4324/9781315583716-2. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The changing Arctic is of broad political concern and is being studied across many fields. This book investigates ongoing changes in the Arctic from a landscape perspective. It examines settlements and territories of the Barents Sea Coast, Northern Norway, the Russian Kola Peninsula, Svalbard and Greenland from an interdisciplinary, design-based and future-oriented perspective. The Future North project has travelled Arctic regions since 2012, mapped landscapes and settlements, documented stories and practices, and discussed possible futures with local actors. Reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of the project, the authors in this book look at political and economic strategies, urban development, land use strategies and local initiatives in specific locations that are subject to different forces of change. This book explores current material conditions in the Arctic as effects of industrial and political agency and social initiatives. It provides a combined view on the built environment and urbanism, as well as the cultural and material landscapes of the Arctic. The chapters move beyond single-disciplinary perspectives on the Arctic, and engage with futures, cultural landscapes and communities in ways that build on both architectural and ethnographic participatory methods.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Glass Borders. antiAtlas Journal. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The deportation of unregistered migrant Maria Amelie after the publication of her book Ulovlig norsk (2010) was a major media event in Norway. In her following book, Takk (2014), she constantly refers to windows, mirrors and camera lenses. Glass becomes a symbol of traumatic experience and configures the in/visibility of the deportation borderscape, creating a political aesthetics of the border.

• Refsum, Christian; Stene-Johansen, Knut & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Introduction. In Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan (Ed.), Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community. Transcript Verlag. ISSN 9783837644319. p. 9–20. doi: 10.14361/9783839444313-001. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). XÉNITEIA/Xeniteia. In Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan (Ed.), Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community. Transcript Verlag. ISSN 9783837644319. p. 313–322. doi: 10.14361/9783839444313-032. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Translation of Xéniteia/Utlendighet. Hvordan leve sammen: Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet. Ed. Christian Refsum, Johan Schimanski & Knut Stene-Johanssen. Oslo: Spartacus, 2016.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Wolfe, Stephen (2017). Intersections: A Conclusion in the Form of a Glossary. In Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Wolfe, Stephen (Ed.), Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781785334641. p. 155–177. doi: 10.2307/j.ctvw048vh.12. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this book we have let six key words – Ecology, Imaginary, Invisibility, Palimpsest, Sovereignty and Waiting – steer parallel but interconnected paths through the field of border aesthetics. The time has come to pull some of the arguments proposed in the introduction together, sum up our conclusions, and make the links between chapters more visible. Embedded in each chapter are many different terms relevant to chapter themes, and a number of these terms appear in more than one of the chapters. By treating this theoretical lexicon as a network of relations between the chapters, we hope to present a snapshot of our thinking here about border aesthetics, at this point of time in the academic debate. Any such state can only be a momentary and incomplete crystallization of a field, pointing as it does towards future and often unknown potentials for research. So while in the following we provide some hopefully useful definitions of the terms which make up the nodal points, definitions which may seem to claim to be definitive, we are very aware that we do this in order to provide a practical basis for debate and criticism, and that given the historical nature of borders and the other phenomena we are examining here, our definitions must be taken as contingent. [...] This is a submitted version of a chapter published in the book Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, eds. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe. © 2017 Berghahn Books

• Görling, Reinhold & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Sovereignty. In Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Wolfe, Stephen (Ed.), Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections. Berghahn Books. ISSN 9781785334641. p. 111–128. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

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• Nyman, Jopi; Schimanski, Johan & Llena, Carmen Zamorano (2024). Temporalities and Subjectivities in Migration Literature in Europe. Lexington Books. ISBN 9781666945027. 179 p. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Temporalities and Subjectivities in Migration Literature in Europe examines migrant stories through the lens of temporality as seen in the role of such issues as integration, waiting, detention, trauma, crisis, and imagined futures. This book argues that a focus on different time scales and perceptions of time will help us understand how the intimate and affective subjectivities of more complex narratives of migration, as articulated in literature, cross into the public sphere and challenge political 'bubbles.' This collection showcases new approaches to and innovative readings of different forms of literary and cultural migration narratives. In addition to developing theoretical tools for the study, the authors present innovative case studies addressing topics such as the European refugee crisis, migration narratives and border crossings in Britain, Spain, and Morocco, as well as experiences of migration in Finland and Norway

• Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Aarbakke, Thea (2022). Transforming author museums From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs. Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781800732438. 338 p. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Nyman, Jopi (2021). Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings. Manchester University Press. ISBN 9781526146267. 280 p. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and narratives in different borderscapes. Written by experienced scholars in the field, Border images, border narratives provides fresh insight into how borders, borderscapes, and migration are imagined and narrated in public and private spheres. Offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border and its ambiguities, this volume makes a valuable contribution to the methodological renewal of border studies and presents ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes. Influenced by the thinking of philosopher Jacques Rancière, this timely volume argues that narrated and mediated images of borders and borderscapes are central to the political process, as they contribute to the public negotiation of borders and address issues such as the in/visiblity of migrants and the formation of alternative borderscapes. The contributions analyse narratives and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, border art, and documentaries, as well as problems related to borderland identities, migration, and trauma. The case studies provide a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from Northern Europe and Britain, via Mediterranean and Mexican-USA borderlands, to Chinese borderlands from the perspectives of critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies, and political geography.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). Grenzungen: Versuche zu einer Poetik der Grenze. Turia + Kant. ISBN 9783851329704. 150 p. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  »Ohne Grenzquerungen wären wir nicht im Stande, das Andere in uns selbst zu entdecken.« Johan Schimanski entfaltet das Phänomen der Grenze als ein Geschehen, das in seinem Versuch, Ordnung zu schaffen, ebensoviele Verwerfungen produziert. Statt als statische Demarkationslinie konzipiert Schimanski Grenzen als dynamische Gebilde, die als Vorgänge der Grenzung gedacht werden müssen. Da diese Grenzungen grundsätzliche Parallelen zu Schrift aufweisen, eröffnet eine Poetik der Grenze das geeignete Instrumentarium, um ihre zahlreichen Dimensionen, Charakteristika und Effekte zu beschreiben, um die Ambivalenz der Grenze zu artikulieren und ihre komplexe politische Struktur lesbar zu machen.

• Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan (2018). Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community. Transcript Verlag. ISBN 9783837644319. 400 p. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Wolfe, Stephen (2017). Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections. Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781785334641. 179 p. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

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• Schimanski, Johan (2025). Islands, Real and Metaphorical: Nations, Utopias, Selves, Borders. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan (2024). Reading, Flight and Homelessness in Ali Smith's Autumn. Full text in Research Archive
• Nyman, Jopi; Schimanski, Johan & Llena, Carmen Zamorano (2024). Understanding Temporalities of Cross-Border Migration. In Nyman, Jopi; Schimanski, Johan & Llena, Carmen Zamorano (Ed.), Temporalities and Subjectivities in Migration Literature in Europe. Lexington Books. ISSN 9781666945027. p. 1–13. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Temporalities and Subjectivities in Migration Literature in Europe examines migrant stories through the lens of temporality as seen in the role of such issues as integration, waiting, detention, trauma, crisis, and imagined futures. This book argues that a focus on different time scales and perceptions of time will help us understand how the intimate and affective subjectivities of more complex narratives of migration, as articulated in literature, cross into the public sphere and challenge political 'bubbles.' This collection showcases new approaches to and innovative readings of different forms of literary and cultural migration narratives. In addition to developing theoretical tools for the study, the authors present innovative case studies addressing topics such as the European refugee crisis, migration narratives and border crossings in Britain, Spain, and Morocco, as well as experiences of migration in Finland and Norway

• Schimanski, Johan (2023). Towards a Border Poetics of European Borderlands. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  European borderlands – either in the sense of cultural landscapes on each side of a national border or in the sense of large regions transversing large parts of the contintent – have been given a more central role in after the dissolution of the power blocs of cold war Europe. New hybrid and provisional cultures have sprung up where once were security wildernesses and homogenous continuities, evoking memories of imperial pasts and creating cultural bricolages. This paper asks questions about the nature of a literature of European borders in a time of change, using border poetics to identify a series of border configurations and borderland tropes. These include spatial questions of divides, overlaps, margins and the ‘borderlandization’ of entire nations, but also the temporal structures of palimpsests and trauma that come out of cultural and political change. Invoking various examples from the borderlands between Russia and Western Europe as alternative literary negotiations of changing borders, the paper uses Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” – itself coming out of his experience of political and cultural change in the Welsh-English borderlands – and a reading of Cecilie Enger’s biographical novel Himmelstormeren (2008) – about photograph Ellisif Wessel’s life in the Norwegian-Russian-Finnish borderlands – to lay out some of the underlying figurations of borderlands.

• Schimanski, Johan (2023). Om Gulraiz Sharifs Hør her’a. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan (2023). Temporality in Border Poetics. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Certain ongoing processes connected to bordering practices, such as migration and pandemics, have been presented in the public sphere as ‘crises’, unconnected to more complex, long-term temporalities. Such long-duration conditions and changes have been brought to the public attention in investigative journalism and social sciences research. The temporalities of bordering practices have been the subject of intense ethnographic research in migration studies, as well as on a more theoretical level by border studies scholars. The literatures of migration and other forms of bordering often address even longer duration temporalities, providing an antidote to the shorter scale narratives of politics and news media. Given that borders are usually seen as spatial phenomena, how do they allow for temporality, and more particularly temporal borders or transition? Borders and borderlands have been addressed in historical terms as subject to bordering, debordering and rebordering, as mobile, and as palimpsestual border landscapes. Border poetics has focused on the analysis of more everyday border-crossing narratives, involving complex spatio-temporal figurations of the border. In this lecture, Schimanski discusses both borderlands literature and the focus on the long-duration nature of migration in migration literature. He argues for making connections between temporalities of border-crossings described by literary texts and crossings of literary texts themselves into the public sphere.

• Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan; Aarbakke, Thea & Forberg, Bente (2022). Liv og litteratur på museum (offentlig panelsamtale/video på Youtube). Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Å besøke sin favorittforfatters skrivested og hjem er et rituale som går tilbake til 1400-tallet. Fenomenet er skapt av litterære fans og forbundet med uforbeholden beundring. På 1900-tallet ble forfatterhjem til museer som hyllet nasjonale figurer. Dagens museumspolitikk stiller andre krav til museenes formidlingstilbud. De skal fornye og problematisere. Hvordan behandle hittil underkommuniserte sider av et forfatterskap? Hvordan stille ut en vanskelig forfatter? Forfattermuseer er i endring. I samtalen med redaktørene av boka Transforming Author Museums: From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs (2022), skal dette under debatt.

• Schimanski, Johan (2022). Europæiske grænser (ud)foldet: Ydre og indre grænser i Julya Rabinowichs Spaltkopf. Passage. ISSN 0901-8883. 37(87), p. 23–34. doi: 10.7146/pas.v37i87.133262. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan (2022). Imagining Sustainable Borders in Migration and Climate Change Literature. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In 2016 Amitav Ghosh published a book-length essay on our failure to act effectively on climate change, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. In it he argues that this failure comes not only from a lack of scientific and historical knowledge, but also a lack of imagination. He argues that one of our most established ways of thinking imaginatively about the world, ‘serious’ literature, is so focused on the realistic and typical that it avoids dealing with change and crisis on an environmental and societal level. He suggests science fiction, a form of literature concerned with environmental and societal change, as an antidote. This lecture is based on my work within a collaborative project on ‘sustainable borders’ in an age of climate change. I will be examining two works of climate science fiction, showing how they present different configurations of borders and migration in futures of rising sea levels and shifting land borders. John Lanchester dystopian novel The Wall (2019) images a Britain surrounded by a wall following its coastline, a wall that has the double function of keeping out both the sea and climate refugees. Kim Stanley Robinson’s critical utopia New York 2040 (2017) describes how people have learned to live both with a city in which the streets have become canals and with climate refugees. Ghosh frames the anthropocene as a product of a forgotten history of the intimate relationship between empire and the petrochemical extraction that has led to climate change. Extending his juxtaposition of history and poetics, I will ask whether postcolonial literatures of migration – with their border-crossing tropes and worrying of the banal nationalism of the typical and the everyday – can also imagine crisis differently from ‘serious’ literature. I suggest that the more contemporary settings of works such as Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016–2020) and Ghosh’s own Gun Island (2019) can be read against science fictional imaginings as pointing forwards to the climate migration literature of the future. Short Abstract Amitav Ghosh suggests in his 2016 essay The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable that science fiction, a form of literature concerned with environmental and societal change, as a form more adequate to the representation of crisis that ‘serious’ fiction, with its focus on everyday realism. I will be examining two works of climate science fiction – John Lanchester dystopian novel The Wall (2019) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s critical utopia New York 2040 (2017) – showing how they present different configurations of borders and migration in futures of rising sea levels and shifting land borders. However, I I will also ask whether postcolonial literatures of migration – with their border-crossing tropes and worrying of the banal nationalism of the typical and the everyday – can also imagine crisis differently from ‘serious’ literature, reading the more contemporary settings of works such as Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016–2020) and Ghosh’s own Gun Island (2019) against those of science fictional imaginings, and suggesting that they point to towards the climate migration fiction of the future.

• Schimanski, Johan (2022). Cognitive Approaches to Literary Bordering. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Borders are central to spatially and culturally. How can we as readers use literary texts and other narratives in order to understand borders, borderings and border experiences? In this lecture I will be using a combination of border studies, border poetics, and cognitive approaches to help find out. A border poetics approach proposes connecting borders met by characters in narrative storyworlds with the borders of the narrative itself as they are met by readers or listeners. Many analyses of borders in literature still however focus mainly on borders that are presented in texts rather than on the borders of those presentations. The question of how these borders can be linked to the borders of those textual presentations remains to be answered fully. I propose that 4E cognitive approaches (around Embodiment, Enactment, Extension and Embeddedness), involving also cultural cognition, emotion, predictive processing and kinesic cues can be combine with border poetics to provide answers to this question. I will also be drawing on cognitive approaches in the interdisciplinary field of border studies which focuses on the way in which narratives are co-constructed by tellers and readers/listeners. To do this I will be carrying out analyses of borders in Aritha van Herk’s Places Far from Ellesmere and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. These do not only address important bordering processes – postcolonial, centre/periphery, Arctic – in the Canadian context, but also reflect actively on cognition, reading and bodies. I will use border poetics analysis as a starting point, mapping the texts onto the geographical and bordered spaces of Canada, showing how they map these spaces on to a bordered textual space. After that I will show how they invoke various kinds of embodiment, movement and cognition for the reader, connecting these to topographical, cultural, architectural, epistemological and textual borders.

• Schimanski, Johan (2022). Space, Borders and Cognition in Urban Diaspora Literature. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Borders are central to our world of migration and diaspora. How can we as readers use literary texts and other narratives in order to understand borders, borderings and border experiences? In this lecture I will be using a combination of border studies, border poetics, and cognitive approaches to help find out. A border poetics approach proposes connecting borders met by characters in narrative storyworlds with the borders of the narrative itself as they are met by readers or listeners. Many analyses of borders in literature, however, still focus mainly on borders that are presented in texts rather than on the borders of those presentations. Beyond the more immediate observation that many novels begin or end with protagonists crossing e. g. national borders, it remains to be asked how the borders presented in texts can be linked to borders of those textual presentations. I suggest that 4E cognitive approaches (around Embodiment, Enactment, Extension and Embeddedness), involving also cultural cognition, emotion, predictive reading and kinetic cues can be combined with border poetics to provide answers to this question. To do this I will be carrying out an analysis of a poem addressing urban spaces by Sarah Zahid, the child of Pakistani parents who grew up in Oslo, using border poetics analysis as a starting point.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2021). (Un)folding European Borders. In Müller-Funk, Wolfgang; Spreicer, Jelena & Steininger, Gerlinde (Ed.), Borders of Europe. Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici. ISSN 9788895868547. p. 45–56. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The volume, the output of a conference held at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici (Rome, 27 Frebruary-1 March 2019), entails two different issues. On the one hand it aims to discuss the state of the arts with regard to the philosophical and cultural discourse on liminal phenomena, while, on the other hand, it refers to the everyday life of European politics, which is not only influenced by the debate on migration and on the borders of the European Union, between Europe and its neighbours, but also within its own member states. The title is deliberately ambiguous. It calls into questions whether Europe can be defined by specific modes of demarcations, but it also points to the quality and nature of these borders (inside as well as outside) and to the role and function of the half-continent.

• Schimanski, Johan (2021). Space, Borders and Cognition in Urban Diasporic Fiction. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Literature involves characters living in spaces and events ‘taking place’, but also the spatial existence of authors, texts and readers. But can one discuss literary spaces without addressing the boundaries and relationships that constitute them? How may border poetics serve, supplement or challenge spatial poetics? How do readers cross the borders into literary spaces? Narrative relies on characters crossing boundaries between symbolic spaces (e.g. families, classes, cultures, life stages) – boundaries often manifested as topographical borders on different scales. One needs only think of the many novels about characters who move in and out of houses, who move between rural and urban spaces, or who move across the borders of nations. In this paper I will be examining a corpus of urban diasporic fictions set in the city of Oslo. While much contemporary migration literature in Norwegian focuses on crossings across Norway’s national borders, this paper examines novels focusing on the topographical borderlands of city suburbs and the symbolic borders between cultures. Zeshan Shakar’s Tante Ulrikkes vei (‘Aunt Ulrikke’s Street’ 2017) and Maria Navarro Skaranger’s Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner (‘All Foreigners have their Curtains Closed’ 2015), have attracted much recent attention. They follow on previous examples such as Mala Naveen’s Desiland (2010) and the ‘father’ of contemporary Norwegian diasporic literature, Khalid Hussain’s Pakkis (1986) – as well as relating to a wider international corpus. In approaching some of the above texts the paper expands on Anne-Maria Sturm’s work (2020) on combining the narratology of space with border poetics in the study of migration literature. However, in line with recent proposals within the interdisciplinary field of border studies, focusing specifically on urban borders (Scott 2020), the paper suggests that cognitive approaches may also be key to understanding the function of borders and cultural encounters between people, characters, readers and texts. Using elements of 4E (Embedded, Embodied, Extended, Enacted) theories of cognition already applied within literary studies (e.g. Kukkonen 2019), its sees the novels concerned as using the formal techniques at their disposal to help readers think through what it is to live on urban and diasporic boundaries. Kukkonen, Karin. 2019. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet (Oxford University Press: New York, NY). Scott, James Wesley. 2020. 'Cognitive Geographies of Bordering: The Case of Urban Neighbourhoods in Transition', Theory & Psychology, [issue not assigned]: 1-18. Sturm, Anne-Maria. 2020. Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen: llija Trojanow – Dimitré Dinev – Sibylle Lewitscharoff – Evelina Jecker Lambreva (Frank & Timme: Berlin).

• Schimanski, Johan (2021). Border Traumas, Aesthetics and Memory. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Taking as its departure point the use of photographs in a novel by Swedish author Johannes Anyuru, this lecture examines the role of border traumas and memory objects in migration literature with help of border aesthetics. We ask whether published narratives of migrant border-crossing may involve the longer, ‘despectacularizing’ temporalities of cultural memory in diasporic and multi-generational contexts.

• Schimanski, Johan (2021). Temporalities and migratory border-crossings in literature and other discourse. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the virtual lecture, Johan Schimanski presents the work he has been leading on temporalities and migratory border-crossings in literature and other discourse. He will offer a general reflection on borders and temporalities through the lens of border poetics. Certain ongoing processes connected to bordering practices, such as migration, pandemics and Brexit, have been presented in the public sphere as “crises”, unconnected to more complex, long-term temporalities. Such long-duration conditions and changes have been brought to the public attention in investigative journalism and social sciences research. The temporalities of bordering practices have been the subject of intense ethnographic research in migration studies, as well as on a more theoretical level by border studies scholars. The literature of migration mostly seems to address even longer duration temporalities, providing an antidote to the shorter scale narratives of politics and news media. Given that borders are usually seen as spatial phenomena, how do they allow for temporal borders? Borders and borderlands have been addressed in historical terms as subject to bordering, debordering and rebordering, as mobile, and as palimpsestual border landscapes. Border poetics has focused on the analysis of more everyday border-crossing narratives, involving complex spatio-temporal figurations of the border. Schimanski discusses migration literature with its focus on the long-duration nature of migration, with various cultural borders often being crossed long after the topographical. He presents ongoing research in the NOS-HS workshop series “Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing” which connects the temporality of migrant crossing topographical border by migrant to their crossings into the public sphere through literature and other discourse.

• Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Dachsberger, Roman & Thaler, Tobias (2021). Gefangen im ewigem Eis: Aufbruch zum Nordpol. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2021). Von der Isolation in der Arktis zum Spektakel in Wien. In Chahrour, Marcel; Höfler, Theresa; Schretzmayer, Birgit & Tavčar-Schaller, Andrea (Ed.), Sehnsucht Ferne – Aufbruch in neue Welten. Schallaburg, Schallaburg Kulturbetriebsges.m.b.H.. p. 238–243. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2021). Seien Sie wilkommen! [video 3'30"]. Full text in Research Archive
• Gfrereis, Heike; Neundlinger, Helmut; Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2021). Littérature, expositions et communication: Une conversation. [Journal]. Culture et Musées. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Forte de ses compétences en littérature et en théorie et pratique des expositions, Heike Gfrereis est cheffe du département des musées aux Archives de la littérature allemande, à Marbach, et commissaire de nombreuses expositions littéraires. Helmut Neundlinger, conservateur du musée W. H. Auden à Kirchstetten, est un écrivain, chercheur et critique qui travaille au Centre de gestion des collections de musées de l’Université du Danube à Krems, et à la collection littéraire de Basse-Autriche. Leur échange avec deux chercheurs du projet Traum (Transformer les musées d’auteurs) a eu lieu à Oslo en 2019. Nous discutons du désir d’exposer la littérature, de la manière dont on peut se libérer des objets de la manière de désapprendre les notions reçues de la littérature, de l’importance de l’interaction et du jeu, de ce qui peut rendre les auteurs difficiles à exposer et des réalités économiques de l’exposition de la littérature.

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2021). Nordlicht in Birmingham: Transcultural, Translingual, Transdisciplinary. In Dorer, Johanna; Horak, Roman & Marschik, Matthias (Ed.), Cultural Studies Revisited: Nordlicht/Revontulet – Aufbruch in Österreich und internationale Entwicklung. Springer Nature. ISSN 9783658320829. p. 323–331. doi: 10.1007/978-3-658-32083-6_26. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Revontulet (finnisch: Nordlicht) heißt der Titel dieses Bandes in Anspielung auf den ersten Cultural Studies-Kongress in Tampere. In ihrer Einladung für diesen Band schreiben die Herausgeber*innen „Cultural Studies waren ein Versprechen, vielleicht sogar eine wissenschaftliche Verheißung. Im wahrsten Wortsinn erschienen sie, als in Finnland die ersten internationalen Tagungen stattfanden, wie ein Nordlicht am Horizont.“

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). Fixing Images of Movement: The Border Poetics of Photographs in the Swedish-African Literary Borderscape. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Johannes Anyuru (b. 1979) and Jonas Hassen Khemiri (b. 1978) are both leading voices in contemporary Swedish literature. These two male authors both have Swedish mothers and fathers who have migrated from Africa, from Uganda and Tunisia respectively. Both engage with the entanglement of their fathers’ stories of migration with their own stories of becoming authors in the novels addressed here, En storm kom från paradiset (Anyuru 2012; trans. A Storm Blew in From Paradise Anyuru 2015) and Montecore: En unik Tiger (Khemiri 2006; trans. Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger 2011), using strategies from historiographic metafiction. In this lecture, Johan Schimanski will be placing the novels in the context of the African-European borderscape and giving readings of photographs and short textual excerpts from the two novels using the tools of border poetics. He will be exploring the roles of photographic images in these novels as borders (topographical, temporal, symbolic, epistemological, media, cf. Schimanski 2006), as border umbilical objects (Castillo 2007), and as traumatic images of bordering (Schimanski 2019), making reference to previous work on Anyuru’s novel (Schimanski 2017) and to work within border aesthetics (e.g. Brambilla and Pötzsch 2017).

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). Å få & å utvikle prosjektidéer. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). A Neoromantic Goose in the Writer’s Home Museum. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). Hva kommuniseres i forfattermuseer? Full text in Research Archive
• Gfrereis, Heike; Neundlinger, Helmut; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike (2020). Literature, Exhibitions and Communication: A Conversation. [Journal]. Nordisk Museologi. doi: 10.5617/nm.7976. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Informed by her competence in literature and the theory and practice of exhibitions, Heike Gfrereis is Head of the Museum Department at the Archive of German Literature in Marbach, and curator of many literary exhibitions. Helmut Neundlinger, curator of the W. H. Auden Memorial Museum in Kirchstetten, is a writer, researcher and critic working at the Center for Museum Collections Management at the Danube University Krems and the literary collection of Lower Austria. The following “exchange of knowledge” between them and two researchers in the TRAUM– Transforming Author Museums project took place in Oslo in 2019. We discuss the desire to exhibit literature and not only biography, how one can free oneself from objects and how objects can create freedom, how to unlearn received notions of literature, the importance of interaction and play, what can make authors difficult to exhibit, and the economic realities of exhibiting literature.

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). Biografi og verk. Kommunikasjonsprosesser i forfattermuseer. En introduksjon. Nordisk Museologi. ISSN 1103-8152. 28(1), p. 4–7. doi: 10.5617/nm.7957. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). Receding Ice Limits: A Historical-Rhetorical Genealogy. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In 1873, the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition discovered Franz Josef Land. Viennese journalists fantasized rhetorically about extending imperial borders into the Arctic, commenting on social and political tensions within the dual monarchy rather than desiring to colonize a useless Arctic. Their images however built on 19th-century perceptions of the Arctic as a (possibly open) polar sea hidden by impenetrable barriers of ice. Ice limits shifted topographically with year and season, defined the structure of heroic exploration narratives, and functioned as epistemological barriers. Trying out new techniques and debunking the open sea theory, the expedition helped move exploration from the oceanosphere to the cryosphere. Today, discourse on ice limits signifies the melting of the Arctic, economic opportunities and climate change. For some, a navigatable “open sea” gives liquidity to capital; for others, receding ice destroys a natural environment and becomes a catastrophic global tipping point. Analyzing texts and images from the 19th and 21st centuries, we show that Arctic, Danube and Alpine ice is not only a question of physical topographies, but also a changing rhetorical figuring of borders, lines, zones and thresholds, and that genealogical understanding of these discourses will enable action.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). (Un)folding Borders. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Border-crossings take the form of extended border-crossings, and it can often seem that those who have crossed a national border have not really crossed the border at all. They visit or live in another country, but are bordered off from their surroundings by the symbolic boundaries of culture and language, a border which can follow the topographical contours of a diasporic or touristic community or their own bodies. Or they live on these borders they have nominally crossed, in hybrid cultures and ambivalent spaces: they have both crossed and not crossed the border. But the (il)logic of ex/internal borders may also apply to larger territories, such as those of Europe, with its historical divides between “real Europes” and “other Europes”. The location of the outer border of Europe is unsure: it may only be an outer border in one conception of Europe, and at the same time be an inner European border in another conception of Europe. Here we will be looking at Julya Rabinowichs debut novel Spaltkopf (2011) to see how it – both as a text in the outside world and as a representation of the world inside the text – uses rhetorical and narrative (con-)figurations order to negotiate memories of historically changing ex/internal European borders.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2020). Border Poetics: Reading Narratives of Border Crossing. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). (Un)folding European Borders in Narratives of Ex/internal Migration. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Because so many border-crossings take the form of extended border-crossings – one can never be sure when the border has actually been crossed – it can often seem that travellers and migrants who have crossed a national border have not really crossed the border at all. It is as if they have taken the border with them, and still exist in bubble-like extension of the territory they come from. They visit or live in another country, but are bordered off from their surroundings by the symbolic boundaries of culture and language, a border which can follow the topographical contours of a diasporic or touristic community or their own bodies. Or they live on these borders they have nominally crossed, in hybrid cultures and ambivalent spaces: they have both crossed and not crossed the border. In both cases, the external border has been moved into the territory and become an internal border, either to the territory or the border-crosser’s self. In his “DissemiNation” essay, Homi K. Bhabha shows how the external borders of the nation always are intimately connected to its internal borders in an uncanny way. The (il)logic of ext/internal borders may also apply to larger territories: Europe is a case in point. But multinational continental spaces pose their own challenges, since the folding of external territorial borders onto internal spaces through travel and migration overlays a space which is already divided, into nations and, in the European case, the divides between “real Europes” and “other Europes”. The location of the outer border of Europe is unsure: it may only be an outer border in one conception of Europe, and at the same time be an inner European border in another conception of Europe. Imperial, colonial and cold war histories have placed the borders of Europe (and Western Europe) at radically different places on the globe, so a border far away from todays’ present external European border may in memory have been an outer border of Europe (or Western Europe). Memories of in/external borders on both national and continental scales are publically negotiated in the two published, book length narratives I will be citing in this paper: Spaltkopf (first published in German, 2008, translated as Splithead, 2011) by Julya Rabinowich, born in 1970 in Moscow and emigrating with her family to Austria in 1977; and Seperator (first published in Norwegian translation, 2011, published in Swedish, 2012) by Enel Melberg, born in Tallinn in 1943 and fleeing with her family to Sweden in 1944. In this paper I will be arguing that these narratives – both as texts in the outside world and as representations of the world inside texts – use rhetorical and narrative (con-)figurations order to negotiate memories of historically changing ex/internal European borders.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Scaling between Border Poetics and Border Studies. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Any wider conception of borders will have a correspondingly broad applicability. Borders can come into play between cultures, nations, regions and continents, but also on on a much smaller scale, for example on the level of bodies and texts. The discursive construction of borders in political, historical or everday life, will move between borders on different scales simply because discourse is the way we negotiate large-scale questions on the level of language. In this paper I will be using the opening of the semi-autobiographical novel Spaltkopf (2008, translated as Splithead, 2011) by Julya Rabinowich, in order to show how borders move between different levels of scale and mobilities of border-crossing. In doing so I will trace an archaeology of the theoretical concerns, concepts and interdisciplinary engagements which connect Border Poetics and the broader field of Border Studies, along with other research fields such as Border Theory, Border Aesthetics and Border Textures. What may such an archaeology tell us about possible future developments in the study of borders and culture in a world in which borders have become globalized?

• Tennøe, Arthur; Spring, Ulrike; Undheim, Inger; Ryall, Anka; Aarbakke, Thea & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Å stille ut litteratur og forfattere. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Hvorfor besøker vi utstillinger om forfattere og litteratur? Det finnes flere og flere forfattermuseer og forfattersentre i Norge, og bibliotekene lager regelmessig litteraturutstillinger. Er vi først og fremst opptatt av forfatterens liv eller forfatterens tekster når vi besøker slike utstillinger? Kan slike utstillinger brukes som møtesteder og bidra til et demokratisk samfunn? Hvilke strategier bruker museer, sentre og biblioteker når de stiller ut litteratur og forfattere, og hvorfor? Lesning av forfatter Elizabeth Beanca Halvorsen, innlegg av Ulrike Spring fra Høgskulen på Vestlandet/Universitetet i Oslo, Arthur Tennøe fra Nasjonalbiblioteket, Inger Undheim fra Garborgsenteret, Thea Aarbakke fra Høgskulen på Vestlandet, og panelsamtale (ordstyrer: Arthur Tennøe) med Thea Aarbakke, Inger Undheim, Ulrike Spring, Anka Ryall fra Universitetet i Tromsø Norges arktiske universitet, og Johan Schimanski fra Universitetet i Oslo.

• Dvergsdal, Alvhild; Olsen, Marianne A.; Spring, Ulrike; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Fulsås, Narve (2019). Den vanskelige forfatteren. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Siden 1800-tallet har vi hedret skjønnlitterære forfattere gjennom utstillinger og museer. Men hva skjer når det kommer fram at noen sider ved forfatteren ikke er så beundringsverdige? I dag avsløres kjente historiske forfattere for deres holdninger. Noen passer ikke inn i lokale og nasjonale fortellinger eller blir rett og slett ikke lenger lest. Hvordan skal vi utstille de «vanskelige» forfatterne? Alvhild Dvergsdal fra Hamsunsenteret, Marianne A. Olsen fra Perspektivet Museum, Ulrike Spring fra Høgskulen på Vestlandet/Universitetet i Oslo og Narve Fulsås fra Universitetet i Tromsø innleder til debatt. Ordstyrer: Johan Schimanski fra Universitetet i Oslo

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Border Aesthetics. In Franzini, Elio; Griffero, Tonino; Matteucci, Giovanni & Gatti, Andrea (Ed.), International Lexicon of Aesthetics. Mimesis Edizioni. ISSN 9788857559926. doi: 10.7413/18258630068. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). kunnskapsutveksling, framtidig permanent Cora Sandel-utstilling. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Fixing Images of Movement: The Border Aesthetics of Photographs in Narratives of Trans-Mediterranean Migration. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This lecture presents published narratives in Norwegian and Swedish about Trans-Mediterrean migration by authors such as Roda Ahmed, Johannes Anyuru and Jonas Hassan Khemiri in order to investigate the representation of migration as media spectacle, as trauma, as memory, and as border object. The lecture prepares for a focused discussion on migration, representation, narratives/images, border aesthetics and border poetics.

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Typologie von Dichterwohnungen. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Das trans/nationale Dichterheim. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  SchriftstellerInnenmuseen oder DichterInnenheime zeichnen sich gerne durch einen hagiographischen Zugang aus, in dem die SchriftstellerInnen in einem spezifischen nationalen Kontext verortet werden. Literatur, Kultur und Territorium werden in dieser Ausstellungspraxis zu einer Einheit; die gelebte Realität der Autorin als Reisende und die übernationale Popularität ihrer Literatur wird hingegen vernachlässigt. Der Vortrag wird Ausgangspunkt in verschiedensten musealen Repräsentationen von Autor und Literatur nehmen, diese auf ihr transnationales Potenzial untersuchen und dadurch neue Sichtweisen auf die Darstellung nationaler SchriftstellerInnen eröffnen. Als Beispiele dienen ungarische sowie andere europäische Museen.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Ali Smith’s Border Analysis: Populism and Migration in the Seasonal Quartet. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In her Seasonal Quartet, Scottish author Ali Smith has set out to describe the aftermath of the Brexit referendum close after the event, defying the tendency of literature to tackle historical events and experience in a long-term and retrospective temporality. The novels, currently being published in sequence according to the seasons described in each book - so far Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2018) have appeared, with Summer planned - both allows readers to identify with the sense of outrage and despair channeled through the main protagonists of the books and to respond to simplified populist images of migration and British identity. The books provide a counterpoint to their own synchrony with contemporary events by evoking the embodied memories of historical migration to Britain and the histories of marginalized female British artists. Borders are both a major explicit motif and theme in the books, and (as in principal in all literary texts) omnipresent in many other ways. This paper approaches the controversial concept of “populism” through the double lens of borders and migration, showing how Smith’s books formulate a border analysis of contemporary populism not only as focused on perceived threats to national borders (migration and the EU), but also as divisive form of internal bordering in communities. A discursive approach to competing definitions of “populism” (right-wing/left-wing, anti-elitist/democratic) will make possible a critical appraisal of Smiths literary negotiation of populism, community, diversity and democracy.

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Exhibiting Transnational Mobility in the Author Museum. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Author museums have long been associated with national narratives, yet with the increased awareness of the transnational mobility of authors, readers, visitors, literature and objects, museums have begun to focus more on international, transnational and cosmopolitan dimensions in their exhibitions. Indeed, author mobility has resulted in a number of old and new author museums situated outside the authors’ countries of origin. Within the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums, financed by the Research Council of Norway, we (a historian with curatorial experience and a researcher in comparative literature) have developed an approach to literary exhibitions based around the idea that such exhibitions always involve (at least) a double act of communication. Literary exhibitions are messages sent from their curators to their visitors about messages sent from authors to readers. Using this simple model, we can understand better how author museums – for example the Strindberg Museum in Stockholm, or the Strindberg Museum in Saxen in Upper Austria – exhibit transnational mobilities on many different levels and concerning many different actors, texts, objects and spaces. At the same time this rather reductive model of communication – as contemporary exhibitionary strategies make us aware – can be a key to understanding its own distorting limitations and productive paradoxes. Who is the Strindberg Museum in Saxen for – tourists cycling along the Danube and literary pilgrims, Swedish or Austrian or other? Or for local school students doing projects on Strindberg? Does the enlarged photograph of the local stone formations that inspired Strindberg’s visions in Inferno lead to the marked path near the museum, in the local and Austrian landscape, or to the book by the Swedish and cosmopolitan author on his time in both Paris and Saxen?

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Literatur ausstellen. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan (2018). Raum und Grenze: Theoretischer Impuls. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan (2018). Migrating Images of the North. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Johan Schimanski is Professor of Comparative Literature and Head of Research at the Department of Literature, European Languages and Area Studies at the University of Oslo, and part-time research Professor of Cultural Encounters at the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests include border poetics, Arctic discourses, postcolonialism, national identity, science fiction, literary museums. Recent publications include (with Ulrike Spring) an interdisciplinary monograph on images of the Arctic in 1870s Central Europe, Passagiere des Eises: Polarhelden und arktische Diskurse 1874 (2015) and (edited with Stephen Wolfe) a collaboration on key concepts within border aesthetics, Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections (2017).

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Arktiske diskurser og fortellinger. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Aglert, Katja (2018). Kjønn og det polare, med utgangspunkt i Katja Aglerts kunstprosjekt Antifreeze. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Can Border Narratives Change Public Conceptions of Borders? The Norwegian–Somali Borderscape in Literature, Public Debate and Knowledge Production. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Building on previous work tracing the narrative and rhetorical production of border concepts in novels and autobiographical texts which address the Somali diaspora experience in Norway, this paper assesses the impact of such narratives on bordering and borderscaping processes in the public sphere. By situating book publications by Amal Aden and Roda Ahmed in a broader field of public discourse including book reviews, social media, immigration debates and research dissemination, the paper compares the borderscape produced in the texts themselves with the borderscapes resulting from their publication. Novels and published autobiographies can be seen as media events subject to mediation and remediation processes, involving specific horizons of expectation and genre protocols. The paper addresses books by Roda Ahmed and Amal Aden, both were born in Somalia, but grew up in Norway. Both involve various kinds of topographical border crossings between Somalia and Norway or between different parts of the Somali diaspora, along with various symbolic, temporal, medial and epistemological border crossings. Along with major narrative border configurations concerning liberation and captivity, both present a repertoire of different border metaphors, each implying different conceptions of the border. Here the focus will lie on how this repertoire compares with that found in the public reception of each book. Both books have been followed by newspaper reviews, book blog entries, social media discussions, library recommendations, public debates, and mass media interviews in which the metaphorical border landscapes in the texts themselves are remediated and negotiated. Discourse analyses with a focus on border concepts in the form of rhetorical figures (e.g. metaphors) and narrative configurations as ”nodal points” thus allow for comparisons which reveal and suggest ways in which literary and biographical narratives affect public attitudes to borders and also border policies.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike (2018). The Glocal in Literary Exhibitions. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Ghostly Voices in the Author Museum. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  When we visit an author museum, especially an author’s home, the objects and rooms suggest to us the author who has lived there. The author will have seen, touched or used many of the objects, but the author’s body is itself not present. It is as if the author haunts the house of the author museum, yet we do not feel afraid or uncomfortable. In this lecture we will take as our departure point two ghost stories in Selma Lagerlöf’s Löwensköldska ringen, and discuss the many-layered narratives, intentions, heritages, identities, temporalities and presentation strategies which author’s home museums, like the ghost stories, involve. Using Mårbacka and other examples of authors’ homes and literary museums, we will ask how the author’s home uses such multi-layering to create authority, how such multilayering may allow the museum to open itself to transformation, and whether a focus on the spectral is a way of counteracting tendencies to make the museum into a monument or memorial to the author? We will also be be arguing for the potential to understand the author’s home through the author’s texts: in Selma Lagerlöf’s case especially in the way she describes care, inheritance, hospitality and hauntings in the many houses which figure in her fictions.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Crossing and Gendering Borders. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Can crossings of borders be gendered? We know that women and men have been ascribed different roles in historical discourses of national identity (Sommer 1990; Yuval-Davis 1997), but what about discourses of bordering and border-crossing? In this lecture I will be using a border poetics approach to analyse both theoretical concepts and narratives, focusing especially on topographical, symbolic and epistemological borders. I will be identifying narrative figures and configurations of space and time which can be connected to established border concepts such as the umbilical border object (Castillo 2007) and the matricial borderspace (Lichtenberg-Ettinger 1994), both of which call on bodily borders perceived as gendered. In order to establish these concepts, I will first use examples from previous readings (Lang and Schimanski 2010; Schimanski 2010, 2013) of literary texts by e.g. Jean Genet (1961), Veza Canetti (1994), Dannie Abse (1992), Terézia Mora (1999) and Yoko Tawada (1991). From these departure points I will address in more detail passages in two published migration narratives written by 1.5-generation Somalian-born migrants to Norway, Roda Ahmed’s novel Forberedelsen (2008, “The Preparation”) and Amal Aden’s testimonial Min Drøm Om Frihet (2009, “My Dream of Freedom”). Finally, I will be asking whether certain central concepts within feminist discourse and feminist theory – such as gender roles, the glass ceiling, situated knowledge, double vision, écriture féminine, corporeal feminism, intersectionality, nomadic subjects and queerness – might be seen as border concepts, and how they may be applied to migration literature.

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Ghostly Voices in the Author Museum. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  When we visit an author museum, especially an author’s home, the objects and rooms suggest to us the author who has lived there. The author will have seen, touched or used many of the objects, but the author’s body is itself not present. It is as if the author haunts the house of the author museum, yet we do not feel afraid or uncomfortable. In this paper we will take as our departure point two ghost stories in Selma Lagerlöf’s Löwensköldska ringen, and discuss the many-layered narratives, intentions, heritages, identities, temporalities and presentation strategies which author’s home museums, like the ghost stories, involve. Using Selma Lagerlöf’s Mårbacka and other examples of authors’ homes and literary museums, we will ask how the author’s home uses such multi-layering to create authority, how such multilayering may allow the museum to open itself to transformation, and whether a focus on the spectral is a way of counteracting tendencies to make the museum into a monument or memorial to the author? We will also be be arguing for the potential to understand the author’s home through the author’s texts: in Selma Lagerlöf’s case especially in the way she describes care, inheritance, hospitality and hauntings in the many houses which figure in her fictions.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Visitors through Time: Homes, Heritage and Hospitality. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Unfolding Ex/Internal Borders in Narratives of Migration: A Border Poetics Approach. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Because so many border-crossings take the form of extended border-crossings – one can never be sure when the border has actually been crossed – it can often seem that travellers and migrants who have crossed a national border have not really crossed the border at all. It is as if they have taken the border with them, and still exist in bubble-like extension of the territory they come from. They visit or live in another country, but are bordered off from their surroundings by the symbolic boundaries of culture and language, a border which can follow the topographical contours of a diasporic or touristic community or their own bodies. Or they live on these borders they have nominally crossed, in hybrid cultures and ambivalent spaces: they have both crossed and not crossed the border. In both cases, the external border has been moved into the territory and become an internal border, either to the territory or the border-crosser’s self. In his “DissemiNation” essay, Homi K. Bhabha shows how the external borders of the nation always are intimately connected to its internal borders in an uncanny way. The (il)logic of ext/internal borders may also apply to larger territories: Europe is a case in point. But multinational continental spaces pose their own challenges, since the folding of external territorial borders onto internal spaces through travel and migration overlays a space which is already divided, into nations and, in the European case, the divides between “real Europes” and “other Europes”. The location of the outer border of Europe is unsure: it may only be an outer border in one conception of Europe, and at the same time be an inner European border in another conception of Europe. Imperial, colonial and cold war histories have placed the borders of Europe at radically different places on the globe, so a border far away from todays’ present external European border may in memory have been an outer border of Europe. In the workshop we will be using parts of the border poetics toolbox to show how published texts can function as public engagements with geopolitical transformations. We will be examining together passages from two books which contain memory narratives of in/external borders and migrations on both national and continental scales: Spaltkopf (first published in German, 2008, translated as Splithead, 2011) by Julya Rabinowich, born in 1970 in Moscow and emigrating with her family to Austria in 1977; and Seperator (first published in Norwegian translation, 2011, published in Swedish, 2012) by Enel Melberg, born in Tallinn in 1943 and fleeing with her family to Sweden in 1944. We will be asking how these narratives – both as texts and as representations of the world inside texts – use rhetorical and narrative (con-)figurations as aesthetic and epistemological engagements in order to negotiate memories of ex/internal European borders.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). konsulentarbeid, utstillingstekster til "Science fiction – fra Gutenberg-galaksen til cyberspace". Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Globalized Borders: An Archaeology of Border Theory, Border Poetics and Border Aesthetics. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Border Theory, Border Poetics and Border Aesthetics are theoretical formations which inhabit the interstices between Literary, Cultural and Border Studies in the wake of poststructuralism, postcolonialism and Chicana/o studies. In this lecture I will be tracing an archaeology of the theoretical concerns, concepts and interdisciplinary engagements which have developed in these approaches to borders. What may such an archaeology tell us about possible future developments in the study of borders and culture in a world in which borders have become globalized, such as the recent formation of the Border Textures concept?

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan (2018). Who speaks in the Author Museum? Finding intentions and authority in literary exhibitions. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  We will be presenting the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums, and taking our departure point in various examples, discussing 1. how author museums can be both read as historical sources to authors’ intentions and themselves be read as intended texts, 2. how Author museums can focus on the contemporary and historical intentions of the Authors and exhibition producers, and 3. how author museums can give authority to specific authors and texts in canonization processes.

• Schimanski, Johan (2018). Liminality and Border Poetics, Thresholds and Border Aesthetics. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In border poetics, thresholds are border figurations which configure the border as a place of overlap and disjuncture between different versions of the border in different dimension (the topographical, the symbolic, the temporal, the epistemological, the textual). Even the most concrete topographical threshold dividing between the inside and the outside of the house complicates the unambiguous image of the border as a line on a single surface: thresholds are often symbolic divisions between the public and the private, spaces in which we can allow the other in over our epistemological border; crossing them or standing on them involves temporalities; and they are the borders of the house seen as a material medium. Because of their similarity with another figuration of the border, the fold, the threshold can suggest doubling, ambiguity and reflexivity; they are in-betweens in which we are in one space but partake in an other. Standing on the threshold, we can cross the epistemological boundary without crossing the topographical boundary. Perhaps by this very token, the fold of the threshold can imply a power hierarchy. As a border figuration, the threshold is what Rancière calls a ‘partage du sensible', a division or a sharing of the seeable and the hearable and thus, as Rancière would argue, an political aesthetic. I will be exploring the political aesthetic of threshold figurations and different conceptions of liminality using examples from fictions and testimonials of migration, arguing that the threshold is not only a typical aesthetic figuration, but intimately connected to (most conceptions of) the process of aesthesis, sensing or perception. Along the way I will suggest ways of connecting border poetics and border aesthetics with the parallel and connected tradition of liminality studies in literature and art.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). What is the North Like? Questions and Answers While Crossing Borders. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Research on images of the North has established a repertoire of images based mainly on travel writing, mythologies, policy documents and literary fictions featuring local or metropolitan viewpoints. Such topoi often combine an imagology of Northerness with discourses of arcticity, winterliness, Nordicity etc. This paper sets out to map images of northernness in postcolonial migrant literature featuring viewpoints originating from the global ”South”, examining a number of fictional or autobiographical public narratives written by migrants to Norway arriving in Norway as children or young adults, including books by Amal Aden, Maria Amelie, Romeo Gill, and Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Tying in to research on changing border concepts in migrant narratives which took place within within the EU FP7 EUBORDERSCAPES project, the paper asks to what degree various topoi of northerness contribute to bordering processes in the texts, and whether these processes in turn produce new images of northernness. Are North and South purely framed in terms of difference in these texts? Is Northernness in migration narratives ascribed to specific cultural values? Are the extended and repeated border crossings these narratives figure connected to specifically Northern territories, as suggested by the title of the collection, Neste stopp Nordpolen: Nye nordmenn – nye stemmer (Next Stop the North Pole: New Norwegians – New Voices, 2005)? Or do images in migration discourse challenge methodological nationalism and eurocentricism? Furthermore I will be asking whether migrants function not only as border crossers and writers, but also as cultural analysts and ethnographers engaged in “research”, “interpretation” and “asking questions about” their new homes? Research, travelling or otherwise, is a form of border-crossing. Like migrants, people who ask questions are subject to typical border-phenomena such as disorientation and liminality, sometimes accompanied by the desire to fix images of others (and the self).

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Arctic Southerners: Ethnonyms, Languages and Qualities in the Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in the 1870s and Today. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  While the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition of 1872-1874 has often been eclipsed by the expeditions of Franklin, Nansen, Amundsen and Scott within the global imagination, it was widely reported in the newspapers and popular press of the time and has later been the subject of numerous accounts, polar histories, scientific publications, paintings, novels etc. The expedition thus constitutes a major discursive event, lying at the epicentre of an extended media complex spreading out across history and through different forms, genres and planes of discourse. Scenes, characters and narratives have been repeated in different contexts and are thus subject to what Foucault has called “material repeatability”: the ability of the same material signifier to appear in different discourses, often signifying quite different things in each case. The negotiation of cultural identities is an important element in the discourse of Arctic expeditions, as it is in many other types of discourse. The Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition media complex involves very many cultural identities, along with identities of class, gender, etc. This mirrors the multicultural make-up of both the expedition and of the producers of discourse on the expedition. Here we concentrate on aspects of one part of the complicated structure of cultural identities, namely that involving the seamen, who are various described as coming mostly from a geographical space stretching over part of the NE coast of the Adriatic, including Trieste, the Istrian peninsula, the islands of Kvarner Bay, and the Dalmatian coast and islands. On the return of the expedition in 1874, their identities were articulated through ethnonyms, languages and the ascription of specific qualities; we argue that the medial discourse of the time can be related to negotiations of national identity and changes in language policies within the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy. In the latter half of the 20th Century and the early 21st Century, quite disparate notions of the seamen’s identities have developed in representations of the expedition in book and web media, again within the context of transformed perceptions of national identity.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Border Traumas, Aesthetics and Memory in Migration Literature. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Post-traumatic conditions are the result of the wounding of bodily or psychic borders. As trauma studies has shown, they are framed and often propogated culturally. Crossing territorial borders can cause traumas: the crossing of the border by migrants and others often involves the crossing of their own bodily or psychic borders. This article will examine autobiographies and novels published in Swedish and Norwegian for the way in which they figure the traumatic effects of migrant border crossings. It will apply a border aesthetics approach, bringing the status of aesthetic narratives as borderings of the sensible (cf. Rancière’s concept of the “partage de sensible”) together with the bordering of the sensible which takes place in the fixations, substitutions and blindspots of trauma. It will argue that published narratives of migrant border-crossing introduce a longer, despectacularizing temporality to the border traumas they involve, necessitating investigation of cultural memory in diasporic and multi-generational contexts.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Refsum, Christian; Stene-Johansen, Knut & Blasy, Stefanie (2018). How to Live Together. [Journal]. Und. Heft für Alternativen, Widersprüche und Konkretes. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Migrant Utopias, Migrant Dystopias. Full text in Research Archive
• Bjørnskau, Hilde; Torp, Jonathan; Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Petrogelli, Hege & Brinch, Sara (2017). Fenomenet mange strever med å forklare: Et grensesprengende litterært tegneseriefenomen på 8000 sider, som kun eksisterer på Internett, har blitt en hit. [Internet]. NRK. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Border Ob-scene, Border Non-Scene, Border Scene. Full text in Research Archive
• Volsing, Katrine; Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Krogh, Andreas (2017). Homestuck: Internettets svar på Odysseen. [Radio]. DR P1. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Internetfortællingen 'Homestuck' er blevet kaldt både grænsesprængende og eksperimenterende - og så er den helt utrolig lang. Det sidste har blandt ført til sammenligninger med Homers berømte historie om Odysseus. Vi har set nærmere på fænomenet.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Blog: Windows, Mirrors, Lenses: The Trauma of Visible Deportation. Border Criminologies Blog. Full text in Research Archive
• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Border Utopias, Border Dystopias. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Current political narratives of ‘no borders’ and a ‘big, beautiful wall’ present us with opposed visions (an ‘axiology’) of future border regimes, utopian or dystopian according to the context. How do literary narratives of migration configure the risks and appeals of different future conceptions of bordering? If utopias are, as has been argued, bordered places or enclaves, how can they cater for the mobilities involved in migration? Besides examples of how utopian borders are evoked in fables and poems of migration and utopia (Ahmed, Le Guin, Bachmann) and in science fiction novels (Le Guin), a reading is given of Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel Exit West (2017) as an contemporary example of a global migrant utopia involving utopian borders in a science-fictional fashion. The argument connects theories of utopia/dystopia (Jameson) and borders in national identity theory (Anderson, Bhabha), as well as the concept of the science fictional ‘novum’ (Suvin), in order to in argue that literature can provide a corrective balance to the current spectacularizing discourse of a ‘migration crisis’.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Border Utopias, Border Dystopias. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Current political narratives of ‘no borders’ and a ‘big, beautiful wall’ present us with opposed visions (an ‘axiology’) of future border regimes, utopian or dystopian according to the context. How do literary narratives of migration configure the risks and appeals of different future conceptions of bordering? If utopias are, as has been argued, bordered places or enclaves, how can they cater for the mobilities involved in migration? Besides examples of how utopian borders are evoked in fables and poems of migration and utopia (Ahmed, Le Guin, Bachmann) and in science fiction novels (Le Guin), a reading is given of Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel Exit West (2017) as an contemporary example of a global migrant utopia involving utopian borders in a science-fictional fashion. The argument connects theories of utopia/dystopia (Jameson) and borders in national identity theory (Anderson, Bhabha), as well as the concept of the science fictional ‘novum’ (Suvin), in order to in argue that literature can provide a corrective balance to the current spectacularizing discourse of a ‘migration crisis’.

• Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). New Insight into Topical Phenomena from Multidisciplinary Border Studies. [Journal]. uef.fi. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  UEF’s long-standing and internationally recognised research expertise in the field of border studies attracts many leading scholars to the university, also from outside Finland's borders. One of them is Professor of Comparative Literature Johan Schimanski from the University of Oslo.

• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). The Museum of Transnational Literature. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). The Museum of Transnational Literature. Full text in Research Archive
• Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Uses of the Arctic: Resources and Discourses. Full text in Research Archive
• Teistung, Even; Schimanski, Johan & Janss, Christian (2025). Home and Nowhere. On homelessness and belonging in W.G. Sebald and Jenny Erpenbeck. Universitetet i Oslo. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This thesis is a comparative study of homelessness and belonging in selected works by W. G. Sebald and Jenny Erpenbeck – the first of its kind. Through close readings of Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten (1992) and Erpenbeck’s novels Heimsuchung (2008), Aller Tage Abend (2012) and Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015) I examine the authors’ representation of different forms of homelessness, flight, and emigration, and what these tell us about the handling of German history after the Shoah. Reading within a theoretical frame provided by Hannah Arendt’s texts on flight and homelessness, and with a double perspective on both the representation of subjective experiences of loss and structural and political bordering, outlines clear differences in the conception of homelessness, as well as the sociopolitical and existential possibilities that appear when narrating a country’s history from the perspective of a fleeing person. The close readings uncover a distinction between what I call existential homelessness in Sebald, and political homelessness in Erpenbeck. Where Sebald’s stories portray the loss of home and belonging as an incurable and irreparable metaphysical trauma of identity, leading to isolation and longing for death, Erpenbeck’s novels show an evolution away from existentialism and into loss of home as a loss of illusion, which clears the ground for new interpretations of history. Sebald’s stories look inward and backward, contemplating loss; Erpenbeck’s novels look outward and forward, towards possible sociopolitical communities in the present. This means that Sebald’s stories portray history as locked in a negative groove, whereas Erpenbeck’s novels challenge the grip of the past over the present. This decisive difference illuminates the image either author draws of Germany’s identity after the Shoah, and prepares the grounds for renegotiations of German identity in the 21st century.

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