Queer Immigrants and the Crisis Aesthetic in Short Fiction
Serkan Görkemli (Associate Professor, English, UConn)
with a response by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (LCL & El Instituto, UConn)
Wednesday, November 1, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
Tobias Wolff once said, “Good stories thrive on difficulty.” Indeed, conflict and, more broadly, crisis are central to the literary genre of the short story and its characters and plot. In this talk, Görkemli will focus on this “crisis aesthetic” in his discussion of You’re Always Welcome Here, his UCHI fellowship project, a collection of fifteen short stories ranging from traditional character-driven narratives to experimental, mixed-form pieces. Featuring queer immigrant and non-immigrant characters in NYC during the Trump presidency and the COVID pandemic, You’re Always Welcome Here roils with personal, political, and existential crises. Görkemli will discuss the genre of the short story, multiple crises in a narrative, and the importance of storytelling to record and reflect on recent events that continue haunting us. Stepping into the shoes of queer immigrant characters who face seemingly unresolvable crises, the audience will contemplate disidentification and allyship in short fiction.
Serkan Görkemli (he/him) is originally from Türkiye and is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Stamford. His research and publications focus on LGBTQ+ literacies and storytelling. He is the author of two books: Sweet Tooth and Other Stories, a collection of interconnected LGBTQ+ short stories set in Turkey (University Press of Kentucky, 2024; 2022 prose selection for UPK’s New Poetry and Prose Series), and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press, 2014; 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication Lavender Rhetorics Book Award). Serkan has a PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University. While at UCHI, he will complete his third book, You’re Always Welcome Here.
Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (they or she pronouns) is a scholar of Caribbean literature and intellectual history and the author of Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time (Rutgers University Press, 2021). Katerina’s essays on literary magazines, literary infrastructure, and Caribbean textual and intellectual circulation also appear in MLN, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Global South, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Inti. Katerina is also a member of the Aimé Césaire research group of the Francophone manuscripts team at the École normale supérieure in Paris and a translator of contemporary Cuban literature. At UConn, Katerina is associate professor of Spanish and Caribbean Studies in the Literatures, Cultures and Languages Department and El Instituto: Institute for Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies.
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
