Christy Wampole’s Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (2016) examines how 20th-century French and German literature and philosophy literalize the botanic metaphor of roots to navigate crises of modernity, nationhood, and identity. From the “querelle du peuplier” contrasting Maurice Barrès and André Gide, to Simone Weil’s notes on enracinement, and Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology and exaltation of Bodenständigkeit, roots became a key trope for defining belonging but also excluding the “unrooted.” Root thinking has been contested or problematized through the articulation of alternative images, such as the rhizome (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) and the archipelago (Édouard Glissant). Nevertheless, metaphors of rootedness are still largely deployed to express positions of anticosmopolitanism, antimigration, and antiglobalism.

This seminar seeks to expand Wampole’s framework by bringing it into dialogue with other national, regional, and post-colonial literary traditions and further interrogate the longevity of this trope. We invite papers that examine how metaphors of roots are used, transformed, or contested across diverse global contexts and which point towards the relevance of this metaphor to political, environmental, and legal discourse. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: 

• Comparative Tropes of Belonging: how do non-European literary and philosophical traditions conceptualize human attachment to the land, soil, or place? Do botanical metaphors have a universal appeal, or other (organic) metaphors take precedence?
• Contrasting Geopolitical Visions and Transnational Legacies: what is the national specificity of narratives of rootedness beyond the French and German case? For example, how do narratives of rootedness coming from European borderlands, or Southern European countries more specifically, compare with the traditions analyzed by Wampole? How is geopolitical difference, friction, or hegemony expressed in other cultural contexts?
• National Belonging and Citizenship: how do hegemonic narratives of rootedness shape the right to citizenship of minorities? Given that 99% of the global population legally possesses a nationality, how does archipelagic thinking work around the national infrastructure that still sustains our globalized world?
• Postcolonial and Diasporic Reconfigurations: How do experiences of forced uprootedness and migration complicate, challenge, or negotiate understandings of rootedness? How has Black humanism embraced rootedness as a form of resistance against the brutality of the slave trade?
• Anticolonialism, Ecocriticism, and Indigeneity: what is the status of indigeneity in anticolonial narratives of rootedness? How does contemporary environmental discourse and activism respond to what Liisa Malkki, borrowing from Arjun Appadurai, calls the “ecological immobility of the native”?