Abstract Multilingual reading is an inherently social and critical practice that questions normative monolingual and nationalist discourses by creating affective bonds with unknown others and bringing together people with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Focusing on the case of The Poetry Project, a civil society organization in Berlin that runs collaborative writing and translation workshops for refugees and hosts public reading events in several languages, this essay looks at practices of multilingual reading that emerge in contexts of migration from an interdisciplinary perspective. Going beyond Western and presentist notions of literature that efface oral storytelling and delivery, we define writing and reading, production and reception, as mutually interconnected practices that are not just performed in community but that also create collective identity. For aspiring multilingual writers, reading their own work to others can be a way of carving out a (counter-hegemonic) space in German society and the literary world. Reading, thus, becomes a rights-claiming and performative activity in the broader sense of the word. Combining methods from literary and translation theory with ethnographic research, including participant observation and interviews, the essay takes into account the complexity of multilingual reading by analyzing its literary representations in the poems, its materiality in the bi- and multilingual format of the Poetry Project’s publications, and its intersubjective, embodied and culturally embedded dimensions at public events where poetry is read aloud. The essay expands the focus of literary research on reading written texts with an anthropological lens, attending to collective and oral practices. In so doing, it explores the social relations and power dynamics involved in reading and writing across cultures, while pointing to the relevance of literature and reading practices to understand the experiences of migration.
Solà et al. (Wed,) studied this question.