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Rights, Permissions, Claims: World Literature and the Borders of Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

B. Venkat Mani
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Extract

In 2016, in the midst of the en masse arrival of refugees in europe, the austrian library association brought out a welcome poster, a Willkommensplakat. At the center of the poster is a human figure with his back toward the viewer, standing upright on a stack of books. The figure bears an uncanny resemblance to the man in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (circa 1817), the famous painting by the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. In the welcome poster, however, Friedrich's willful, romantic wanderer, standing on the solid ground of rocks, is replaced by a migrant, forced to leave his nation of residence, seeking refuge, perched on precarious grounds. Instead of a sea of fog, the figure in the poster faces a vast screen, on which the word “welcome” is spelled out in twenty-nine world languages from Arabic to Yoruba, including sign language.

Type
Theories and Methodologies New Geographies of Reading
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 1: Special Topic Cultures of Reading , January 2019 , pp. 144 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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