Congist'26: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crisis

Session

Session 3.1 (Day 2)

D2-S3-A6

14 May 2026, 14:00

A6 (Istanbul University Faculty of Letters)

Conveners

Session 3.1 (Day 2): Edebiyat Bilimi / Literary Studies

• Selena Özbaş (İstanbul Yeni Yüzyıl University)

Crisis, Memory, and Space: Examining a Migration Narrative through Bhabha’s “Third Space” and Proshansky’s “Place Identity" (D2-S3-A6)

Mehmet Sarı (Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University)

14/05/2026, 14:00

Oral Presentation

Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria is an important autobiographical text that addresses the relationship between migration, identity, belonging, and language within the framework of exophony (writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue). Born in Bulgaria, Kassabova writes in English, leaving her mother tongue behind; this choice...

Living with Crisis: Colonial Violence and Contested Memory in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (D2-S3-A6)

Ersoy Gümüş (Istanbul University)

14/05/2026, 14:20

Oral Presentation

This paper examines Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020) as a literary exploration of crisis in colonial and postcolonial East Africa, with particular attention to the material crisis of survival under imperial violence and the cultural crisis of remembering and narrating that violence in its aftermath. Set during German colonial rule and the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905–1907), the novel...

Reframing Iraq and Syria: Latin American Travel Writing in Times of Crisis (D2-S3-A6)

Marcos Padron Curet (Princeton University)

14/05/2026, 14:40

Oral Presentation

Since the mid 20th century, Latin American literature has been continuously associated with baroque novelistic forms, while other genres such as travel writing are oftentimes ignored. However, during the aesthetico-political project of the 1960s Boom, Latin American authors not only developed an internationalist political consciousness, but also actively engaged with geographies outside of the...