Abstract: Telling the “right” narrative is pivotal for a refugee’s future in Europe. Once they have entered the process of claiming asylum in a EU member state, much depends on their narrative of persecution and its credibility in the eyes of EU officials. In this lecture I will juxtapose this legal genre of refugee testimony – the narrative that is decisive in the official asylum procedure – with several works of literature of a different testimonial kind: narratives that, in a quasi-autobiographical vein, describe the ins and outs of life as an asylum seeker. In what ways do these literary testimonies – testimonies of a life of waiting in a Kafkaesque world “in between” – interact with these legal refugee narratives? In how far can these testimonies, offered in a temporal parallel to the asylum claiming process and addressed to the host country’s readership, be seen as forms of speaking back, as means of claiming agency in situations that rather seem to deprive the asylum seekers of their personhood? And, last but not least: what is our role, as readers of these testimonies?

Liesbeth Minnaard is Assistant Professor at the Film and Literary Studies Department of Leiden University. Her research is situated in and across the fields of comparative literature, literary and cultural theory, migration studies, Dutch literary studies, German literary studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies and intersectionality. She is the author of the monograph New Germans, New Dutch. Literary Interventions (Amsterdam University Press, 2008) and co-author of De lichtheid van literatuur. Engagement in de multiculturele samenleving (Acco, 2015 – with Maria Boletsi, Sarah De Mul, and Isabel Hoving). She is co-editor of the volumes Ethnizität und Geschlecht. (Post-)Koloniale Verhandlungen in Geschichte, Kunst und Medien (Böhlau, 2005), Literature, Language and Multiculturality in Scandinavia and the Low Countries (with Wolfgang Behschnitt and Sarah De Mul, Rodopi 2013), Beyond the Myth of Monolingualism and Nach der einen Sprache: literarische Mehrsprachigkeit? (both with Till Dembeck, KultuRRevolution, 2013 and Rodopi 2014), and Languages of Resistance, Transformation and Futurity. From Crisis to Critique (Palgrave Macmillan 2020 – with Maria Boletsi and Janna Houwen).