Abstract of “Anagram––Atithi––Anarchy, Sub Rosa, German Imperialism” by Miriam Rainer, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2022 How to live together in the afterlife of a German imperialism that is ongoing––this query is at the heart of the dissertation project. In its exploration of textualities endemic to specific colonial encounters in the wider German context, my thesis engages vast and discontinuous transnational literatures of the long twentieth century in the attempt to frame certain, less expected, instances of anticolonial attachment. While historical anarchism has always been an important source for anti-imperial thought, it is by way of method––making philology anagrammatic––that it might be shown that in seemingly unrelated materials, too, aspirations for anticolonial arrangements have anarchy as their hidden ingredient. This thesis, thus, folds together barely connected histories across disparate discursive environments, and in doing so accounts for models for rearranging linguistic life anarchically in the wake of the colonial predicament. That said, anagram as a way of intervening into social and political formations via literary form allows for an anti-brutalist account of German new imperialism, raising the question of anarchy––tethered to that imperialism––in varying terms. Each chapter is host to recurrent clusters of ideas––such as hospitality, invisibility, anagram, camouflage, form, rumor, and eating. Chapter 1 examines the category of “visitation” in Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” and Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock”, both written in 1959, against the backdrop of the Kantian formalization of hospitality. Chapter 2 juxtaposes Rosa Luxemburg’s political zoology of capital with Rabindranath Tagore’s notes on revolutionary hospitality. It includes readings of Raqs Media Collective, Franz Kafka, and Ranajit Guha, investigating literary strategies to achieve epistemic rearrangement through the tellings of variously storied Rosas. Chapter 3 argues that through camouflage and anagram, Suzanne Césaire and Unica Zürn, each in her own way, rehearse practices that can serve as models for living with but becoming unavailable for the colonial paradigm. The emergence of minor practices across this project suggests new avenues for study across humanistic disciplines, especially philology, postcolonial studies, comparative literature, critical race theory, and ethics.
