Congratulations to current Ph.D. student Ena Selimović, whose interview with Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon (The Zombie Wars) appears on Balkanist.net and is linked to in the 1/27/2017 issue of WashU's Ampersand.
The interview focuses on multilingualism, translation, nationalism, immigrant literature and Donald Trump.
Excerpt: “The [publishing] industry sees that multidimensionality as part of the immigration phenomenon; we came here and started writing in English—and that is true, obviously—and by doing so, we are presumed to have lost some kind of essence or home that existed in the previous language. But the possibility that one can exist in two languages simultaneously is baffling to monolingual people. So there is a sort of self-congratulatory aspect to ‘immigrant literature,’ like ‘Look at us, reading all these people from elsewhere and we understand.’”
Entire interview appears here.
