Dis/possession: De/constructing Property in Contemporary Literature and Film

Panel 1: Religion and Body

Maryam Mirza (Durham University): Possessing the Buddha: Contested Ownership in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand

Penny Cartwright (University of Oxford): “I who whole/ do not/ encompass [...] her”: Second Person Narration and Cultural Commodification in This Mournable Body

Panel 2: Nature and Property

Carolyn Fornoff (Cornell University): Mourning Extractivist Dispossession

Solvejg Nitzke (Technische Universität Dresden): In the Deep Time Shadow of Trees: Possession, Property, and the Rights of Nature

Panel 3: Globality and Locality

Claudia Nitschke (Durham University): The Phantom Pain of Property: Dispossession and Possession in Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker’s Dispossession (Enteignung)

Michael Bies (Freie Universität Berlin/IFK Wien): “The Time of Fuzz and Fluff”: Dispossession and Collective Narration in Heike Geißler’s The Week (Die Woche)

Final Discussion