"the market would like it if we were just 'exile authors'." Multidimensional construction processes of authorship in the current context of exile, migration and flight

In addition to academic presentations, there were readings by two refugee or exiled authors, Barbaros Altuğ and Meral Şimşek.

The conference posed the question of multidimensional construction processes of authorship in relation to the relevant current literature. The aim was to critically examine the concepts of exile, migration and refugee literature - as shimmering, heterogeneous attributions, possibly even as labels or clichés that do not correspond to any clear 'realities'. Rather, they are produced and applied by various actors for political and social, aesthetic and economic reasons. This has serious consequences for the authors, as external attributions in particular have normative power, shape life and work and make them (in)visible in a specific way. At the same time, authors themselves actively work on certain concepts and images of authorship, whereby their self-attributions interact with the circumstances surrounding them.

The conference analyzed concepts of authorship in the context of exile, migration and flight, which prove to be constructions produced by various actors in the literary system. (1) The authors themselves were examined, their self-representations and expressions, (un)used media spaces of action and designed aesthetic-poetological programs. This is contrasted with external attributions, for example (2) by the literary market and the literary public, which control publication, distribution, reception and criticism. In addition, (3) the role of solidarity politics in the construction of authorship had to be reflected upon and finally (4) the modified perception in the original home country. Themes such as home and foreign, identity and transculturality, memory and displacement, mobility and localization, speaking and silence play a central role. They traverse the diverse concepts of authorship and in this way profile the broad lines of the overall theme of multidimensional construction processes of authorship.