Description du projet
Des narrations plurielles offrent une image fédératrice de l’humanité
Le projet Minor Universality, financé par l’UE, repose sur l’affirmation de Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie selon laquelle une histoire unique mène à de mauvaises interprétations. Au cours de sa conférence TED, l’auteure nigériane a soutenu l’idée que les narrations plurielles offrent une image plus juste et fédératrice de l’humanité. Évoquant l’impact de l’universalisme occidental sur les cultures, qui considère les idées occidentales comme universelles, l’auteure a souligné la sous-représentation de nombreuses cultures. Le projet Minor Universality entend contribuer au dialogue sur l’universalité après l’universalisme occidental. Il étudiera le rôle que la narration joue dans les imaginaires collectifs et se concentrera sur les expressions culturelles comme la littérature, les films et les médias sociaux.
Objectif
In her TED Talk 2009 the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made an argument on „the danger of a single story“. She maintained that only plural narrations do justice to the complexity of humankind: „Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.“ Thus narrations have the power to produce a unifying experience of equal humanity. Minor Universality aims to make a substantial contribution to the debate on the problem of universality after Western universalism. Indeed, the question of how universality can be produced is crucial in times characterised by a double relativistic signature: the necessary critique of Occidental universalism, and identitarian assertions. But how can a shared human horizon be addressed? Here general narratology provides a crucial twist: if it is an anthropological characteristic of the narration to make a claim about the world as a whole starting from a singular setting, narrations create ways of extending concrete contexts towards universality. This can be analyzed in literature, in an epistemic field beyond the book and in social practices being part of global migrations. In contrast to the conceptual debate on World Literature, which addresses the question through canons and legitimacies, this project shifts the debate to narratological problems of world production: with which aesthetic means do contemporary cultural productions such as literatures, films and social media, literary festivals, architectures and museums, open up local settings so as to produce a new sensuous, embodied or intellectual awareness of universality?
Re-expanding the material and medial turns to processes of consciousness and agency, the project is set to have a general impact in comparative literature and cultural studies. It will explore new literacies about the role of narration for civil imaginaries of our world and provide ways to address universality in debates about justice and legitimacy within world society.
Champ scientifique
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitution d’accueil
66123 Saarbrucken
Allemagne