Birte Heidemann | Technische Universität Dresden (original) (raw)

Books by Birte Heidemann

This book uncovers a new genre of ‘post-Agreement literature’, consisting of a body of texts – fi... more This book uncovers a new genre of ‘post-Agreement literature’, consisting of a body of texts – fiction, poetry and drama – by Northern Irish writers who grew up during the Troubles and published their work in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. In an attempt to demarcate the literary-aesthetic parameters of the genre, the book proposes a selective revision of postcolonial theories on ‘liminality’ through a subset of concepts such as ‘negative liminality’, ‘liminal suspension’ and ‘liminal permanence.’ These conceptual interventions, as the readings demonstrate, help articulate how the Agreement’s rhetorical negation of the sectarian past and its aggressive neoliberal campaign towards a ‘progressive’ future breed new forms of violence that produce liminally suspended subject positions.

Chapter 3, "Urban Poverty and Homelessness in the International Postcolonial World"

Journal Articles and Book Chapters by Birte Heidemann

Phoenix: Sri Lanka Journal of English in the Commonwealth, 2019

An interview with Anuk Arudpragasam on his debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), whic... more An interview with Anuk Arudpragasam on his debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), which is set during the final days of the Sri Lankan civil war.

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2019

This article examines the lingering presence of the female militant figure in post-war Sri Lankan... more This article examines the lingering presence of the female militant figure in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing in English. Through a careful demarcation of the formal–aesthetic limits of engaging with the country’s competing ethno-nationalisms, the article seeks to uncover the gendered hierarchies of Sri Lanka’s civil war in two literary works: Niromi de Soyza’s autobiography Tamil Tigress (2011) and Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012). The reading draws attention to the writers’ attempt to “historise” the LTTE female fighter and/or suicide bomber within Sri Lanka’s complex colonial past and its implications for the recent history of conflict. The individual motives of the female fighters to join the LTTE, the article contends, remain ideologically susceptible to, if not interpellated by, the gendered hierarchies both within the military movement and Tamil society at large. A literary portrait of such entangled hierarchies in post-war Sri Lankan texts, the article reveals, helps expose the hegemonic (male) discourses of Sri Lankan nationalism that tend to undermine the war experiences of women.

Available as OnlineFirst read: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0021989417723414

Wasafiri, 2017

Includes reviews of A Long Watch: War, Captivity and Return in Sri Lanka (2016) by Sunila Gala... more Includes reviews of

A Long Watch: War, Captivity and Return in Sri Lanka (2016) by Sunila Galappatti

Lost Evenings, Lost Lives: Tamil Poems of the Sri Lankan War (2016), ed. and trans. by Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling

What Lies Between Us (2016) by Nayomi Munaweera

Creative Lives, 2018

An interview with Sri Lankan Australian novelist Shankari Chandran on her writing routines and pr... more An interview with Sri Lankan Australian novelist Shankari Chandran on her writing routines and practices, and her debut novel Song of the Sun God (2017).

Part of the Creative Lives Project of the South Asian Diaspora International Researchers’ Network (SADIRN) at Monash University, Australia.

http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/creative-lives/third-interview/

Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights, Apr 2015

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Jun 2012

After the 9/11 attacks, Orientalist ideologies have dissolved into various public domains of know... more After the 9/11 attacks, Orientalist ideologies have dissolved into various public domains of knowledge, cutting their way from academia into popular imagination. In diagnosing these dangerous developments, critics such as Hamid Dabashi have identified the need to re(de)fine the Saidian framework in order to both locate and dislocate new sites of Orientalism. Through a close reading of H.M. Naqvi's Home Boy (2009), this essay explores how the novel is informed by a decisive counter-Orientalist politics that forges a narrative strategy to dissect the emergent post-Orientalist discourse(s). Such a reading is aimed at re-articulating the changing yet diffuse modes of (post-) Orientalism outside of its literary parameters. At the same time, the essay examines how the novel inflects both the solidarity and suspicion amongst minority communities in the post-9/11 context by means of shared victimhood.

From Popular Goethe to Global Pop: The Idea of the West between Memory and (Dis)Empowerment, 2013

As much as the 9/11 attacks rekindled the rhetoric of antagonisms of the West vs. the Rest, they ... more As much as the 9/11 attacks rekindled the rhetoric of antagonisms of the West vs. the Rest, they continue to pulverise "old" representations of power, while reviving the calibrated links of terrorism and capitalism that have infested contemporary global politics at large. Through a close reading of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist , this essay explores how the novel interrupts the notion of a wounded West by introducing an array of both human and institutional bodies. The narrative's texture and textuality of what I call 'symbolic body' manifest the mechanics of post-9/11 politics, which have been shaped by certain neo-colonial ideological tendencies. At the same time, the essay examines how the corpor(e)ality of the novel's main characters -Pakistani and American -overturns the discursive tensions of the War on Terror, resulting in a rhetoric that, above all, seeks to defy the binaries of "us" and "them".

From Popular Goethe to Global Pop’: The Idea of the West between Memory and (Dis)Empowerment, 2013

Journal of Postcolonial …, 2011

This issue is special in the sense that it simultaneously explores the topicality, topography, to... more This issue is special in the sense that it simultaneously explores the topicality, topography, topology and typography underlying the wide range of the "urban imaginary". This is to say, the aesthetic investments characterizing the textures of literary representations of the postcolonial metropolis and/or what we call the "new" metropolis. Although the very concept of the metropolis "has been used in contexts of colonial and imperial and postcolonial criticism" (Farías and Stemmler 12), recent scholarship dealing with urban literature has mainly focused on London as the former colonial centre (

Narrating Nomadism: Tales of Recovery and Resistance, 2013

interjuli: Internationale Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung , 2009