Jennifer Leetsch – författare

This book brings into conversation perspectives from the disciplines of history, literary studies, archival studies and religious studies, and explores the entanglements of life writing and dependency studies. It demonstrates how life writing offers a vital entry point into the lived realities of dependency across time and space. Personal testimonies, autobiographies and archival traces serve here as contested sites of self-representation, revealing as much about the structures of dependency – such as slavery, serfdom, indenture, captivity, debt bondage and coerced labour – as about strategies of resistance, agency and relational and communal self-fashioning.Contributors engage with a wide range of case studies from North America, West Africa, the Caribbean, Central Asia, Mughal India and Tibet. Together, they probe archival silences, editorial interventions and the interplay between autonomy and dependency that unsettles simple binaries of slavery and freedom, voice and silence, life and death. Uniting this interdisciplinary inquiry is the shared affiliation of its authors with the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), a research hub dedicated to investigating asymmetrical dependencies in global historical perspective.The book is designed for advanced undergraduate students, graduate researchers, and established academics interested in the intersection of personal narrative and historical analysis. It will prove particularly valuable for scholars examining questions of agency, resistance and self-representation within contexts of structural inequality. Additionally, the volume serves as a crucial resource for historians, literary scholars, and social scientists investigating the global dimensions of dependency relationships and their documentation through personal testimony.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space.

This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space.

In a global context in which phenomena of migration play an ever more important role, the ways individual and collective experiences of migration are covered in the media, represented in culture, and interpreted are coming under increasing scrutiny. This book explores the complex relationship between creative engagements with migration on the one hand, and forms of knowledge about migration on the other, inquiring into the ways aesthetic practices are intertwined with knowledge structures. The book responds to three pressing research questions. First, it analyses how fictional texts, plays, images, films, and autobiographical accounts mediate forms of knowledge about migration. Second, it identifies the ways in which specific media approaches and aesthetic practices influence people’s ideas about and awareness of migratory experiences in a globalized world. Finally, it delineates how historical perspectives help us compare epistemological approaches to migration in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, and how these approaches affect the way critics and the public responded to and thought about different forms of (forced) migration. Bringing together renowned scholars working across disciplines, it investigates the possibilities and limitations that different media present when it comes to reflecting on, communicating, and imagining experiences of migration, and how these representations in turn create ways of knowing and understanding migration.