Writing Oneself into History | Kosovar-Albanian Literature in the German-speaking sphere with Dr Chloe Fagan

Dr Phil ⁠Chloe Fagan⁠ is our guest for the episode Writing Oneself into History | Kosovar-Albanian Literature in the German-speaking space.Dr Chloe Fagan received a Bachelor's Degree in German and English, and then her PhD in German Literature from Trinity College Dublin. She currently works for Goethe-Institut Irland. She has published 'Translation and the Renegotiation of Albanian-Austrian Migrant Identity: Ilir Ferra's "Halber Atem" as a Critique of Migrantenliteratur' in Moving Texts, Migrating People and Minority Languages (2017) and "Senthuran Varatharajah's Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen. Representing the Kosovo War and the Tamil Conflict as an Absence and the Trauma of Language" in Germanistik in Irland. Writing oneself into history | Kosovar-Albanian Literature in the German-speaking sphere. Situating and differentiating between experiences matters. Unlike Turkish-German literature, which took root in Germany with the arrival of the Gastarbeiter, Kosovar-Albanian and Albanian writing in German-speaking contexts did not begin to appear until the 1990s. While it is gaining more traction, it remains a marginal movement, and precisely for that reason, it highlights the stakes: the need for recognition and for recording different ontologies of place, memory, and identity. It shows how communities carve out visibility when the archive has not made room for them. To discuss this and the quest to learn Albanian, I spoke to Chloe Fagan for this episode.