Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration

(University of Toronto Press, 2023)

In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city – a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of Berlin is made literary – from old neighbourhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. Highlighting the differences, tensions, and contradictions of these scenes, this book reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migration.

Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, rich historical archives, and literary analysis, Moving Words examines the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths. Along the way, Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and in space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities.

Reviews

"Moving Words is an extraordinary feat: a lyrical essay on Berlin, an erudite treatise on the ethnography of languages, and a multilayered commentary on the centrality of migration and refuge in the making of a city and its literatures. Brandel moves seamlessly from anthropology to philosophy to literary criticism with uncommon facility, and in doing so gives us a major milestone in scholarship on migration and literatures."

B. Venkat Mani, Professor of German and World Literatures, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and award-winning author of Recoding World Literature

"Brilliant and original – Brandel weaves together the movements of literature and people, focusing on encounters in the globally mixed, literary city of Berlin. He shows that literature makes a difference, helping us to refine our moral worlds. And in the most compelling way, he demonstrates that being at home and being in motion are compatible."

Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center

"Brandel’s attention and sensitivity to each word in context, his infinitely broad and diverse culture, and his original and personal involvement in European worlds make Moving Words a treasure trove of concepts and experiences. This groundbreaking book offers an exciting approach to cross-disciplinary and cross-Atlantic conversation and brings fields and voices together in creative and erudite ways."

Sandra Laugier, Professor of Philosophy, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

"Brandel’s book offers a highly original and thought-provoking recalibration of the terms of debate within the field of anthropology and literature. By carefully exploring the question of what makes connections literary, the author throws up a range of intriguing insights as well as providing the reader with a fascinating account of literary life in Berlin. Moving Words challenges us to rethink how the literary provokes contexts and enables connections to appear or gives form to urban relations. As such, it points the way forward for a literary anthropology vitally invested in the study of literature in action."

Adam Reed, Reader in Social Anthropology, University of St. Andrews

Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality

Edited with Marco Motta (Fordham University Press, 2021)

This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language.

Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip.

Reviews

A remarkable collection with genuine interdisciplinary reach, Living with Concepts opens up a critical dialogue between philosophers and anthropologists about the various paths that thinking can take when concepts are rethought as intrinsic to forms of life.”---Jason Throop, UCLA

“Living with Concepts moves between anthropology and philosophy in fresh and fruitful ways that powerfully bring out the moral and political urgency of understanding what is involved in trafficking in concepts. The contributors are united in questioning the legitimacy of assumptions so widespread they might be described as belonging to the zeitgeist.”---Alice Crary, New School for Social Research

A book like this can be recommended to university-level students and scholars across any discipline. For anthropologists, it is a must-read irrespective of the branch one belongs to. —- Anthropology Book Forum