The Democratic Republic of the Congo has a history shaped by extreme violence – slavery, resource exploitation, colonial rule, decolonisation, postcolonial dictatorship, and ongoing wars and armed conflicts. What might “reparation” mean in such a setting? Who gives it, and to whom? Is it even possible? What form could it take? How is the idea of reparation linked to resilience, healing, or reconciliation? This project explores what literature and film might offer: How do Congolese narratives – whether in prose, poetry, theatre, or film – engage with the experience of violence? What role might texts play in broader processes of repair? Our project has two main components and employs a comparative lens. Marie Guthmüller, a scholar of Romance literatures, concentrates on Congolese diasporic literature and its implied readership in the Global North, while Susanne Gehrmann, an Africanist, focuses on literary and cinematic works produced within the DRC. We will compare literary and film production in Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, and Goma to that of the diaspora in cities such as Paris, Brussels, and Montreal. Our working hypothesis is that violence is represented differently in local versus diasporic works – and that these representations serve distinct purposes, shaped by their intended audiences.
PROF. DR. SUSANNE GEHRMANN
CURRICULUM VITAE
Susanne Gehrmann studied languages and literature in Bochum, Paris, and Cologne, completing her doctorate in literary studies in 2001 at the University of Bayreuth. Since 2011, she has been a professor of African literatures and cultures at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she teaches postcolonial anglophone and francophone literatures from Africa and the diaspora. She has been a Feodor Lynen Fellow at Université de Laval in Québec and a fellow at the Academy for Advanced African Studies in Bayreuth. Her current projects focus on the intellectual exchange between Nigeria and the négritude movement during the 1950s and 60s, particularly in connection with the journal Black Orpheus (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), and on representations of violence in Congolese literature (DFG). She is co-editing a literary history of Africa (Metzler) and serves as the academic director of the Janheinz Jahn Archive.
PROF. DR. MARIE GUTHMÜLLER
CURRICULUM VITAE
Marie Guthmüller has been a professor of Romance literatures, specialising in French-language literatures, at Humboldt University since 2019. Prior to her appointment in Berlin, she conducted research and taught at the University of Tübingen, Ruhr University Bochum, the University of Osnabrück, and the The Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL Berlin). She has led several projects funded by the DFG and launched the Franco-German doctoral programme “Littérature et savoirs/Literatur und Wissen” in 2023. As a scholar of Romance studies, she works on French, francophone, and Italian literature from the seventeenth century onward. Her research is situated within the field of literature and science studies, with particular emphasis on the reciprocal relationships between literature and the psychological sciences. Her work includes investigations into the boundaries and interactions between literary criticism and psychophysiology, and into literature and dreams, hagiography and knowledge of the soul, and autobiographical writing. She also conducted research for many years on Belgian colonial literature and francophone literature from Congo.
