A Europe of Connections:Post-National Worlds in Contemporary Minority Literature

The minoritized writer is back. Contemporary literary fiction and poetry registers and gives expression to wide-spread societal discussion on issues of borders, culture, and identity. For two centuries, the nation-state has been the regulatory framework through which collective identities were almost naturally formed. Those individuals who were thought to belong were national citizens, members of “the people.” Towards the end of the twentieth century, the quickly intensifying process of globalization made other, more individualistic and idiosyncratic ways of identity formation and experience possible. The massive opening of the global space after 1989 encouraged cross-border labour and mobility, and fostered transnational and diasporic group formation, linguistic mixing, and affective relations unbothered by the nation-state. Minoritized writers find themselves in the midst of this transition. They are at odds with dominant understandings of the nation on the one hand, and enticed but not (entirely) convinced by the promises of the global on the other hand. Consequently, their work is often studied as resulting from and being expressive of this position in between the nation and the promise of global space: either as containing critiques of national identity and crafting new forms of belonging (in the case of migrant or diasporic writers), or as part of cordoned-off, localized cultures and languages (in the case of writers writing in national minority languages). These approaches contrast individual minority groups against hegemonic national majorities. The point of departure of this book, however, is that in the context of tensions between the national and the global the similarities between various minority groups are greater than their differences and variations

Anxious About a Changing World:Twenty-First Century Low Countries Gothic Novels

As the representation of Western modernity’s dark undercurrent, the Gothic novel has since its inception in the 1760s developed and transformed alongside that modernity. This paper looks at two contemporary Gothic novels from the Low Countries, Herman Franke’s Wolfstonen (2003) and Saskia de Coster’s Wat alleen wij horen (2015), which are occupied with contemporary globalisation and immigration to the Netherlands and Belgium. Both novels cast the apartment buildings that are central to their plots as Gothic spaces fraught with images of modern, globalised society, as well as widespread anxiety over societal cohesion in ethnically and culturally diverse cities. An interdisciplinary reading constituted by gothic and postcolonial reading practices brings to the fore new elements of the Dutch and Flemish cultural imaginary. It reveals the continuous renewal of the gothic itself, but also into the changes brought to the Low Countries as a result of globalisation and immigration. These have their effect on the construction of community, a process that is articulated in both the form and the content of the novels’ narratives. Ultimately, I argue, the gothic is put to work in these novels as a way of dealing with the anxieties about and uncertainties of a postcolonial world

Book Review: Jelle Krol, Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors

Book review of Jelle Krol, Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One: A Case Study of Four European Authors. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xii+346pp., 8 illustrations. ISBN 9783030520397<br/