Hadji Bakara

My research focuses on 20th and 21st century global, Anglophone, and American literatures, especially in their relation to histories of war, empire, decolonization, migration, and human rights. I am generally interested in the ways that literature helps shape the political and epistemological categories by which we live, such as “life,” “freedom,” “citizenship,” “world,” the “human,” and the “future.” This makes me something of generalist, and I welcome departmental conversations and graduate students from across historical periods.

At the University of Michigan, I teach undergraduate courses on race and economics in global literature, refugee literatures, literature and human rights, transnational American literature, Cold War culture, and literary research methodologies. At the graduate level I teach courses on the transhistorical literature of migration and on archival method and theory.

I have recently completed a literary history of human rights in the twentieth century called Governments of the Tongue: On Writing and Human Rights History, which includes chapters on stateless and refugee writers (B. Traven, Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht), the early architects of P.E.N International (H.G. Wells, Storm Jameson), poet-statesmen who helped draft the United Nations declarations of human rights (Archibald MacLeish), imprisoned writers (Kim Chi Ha, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’O, Agostino Neto, Jacabo Timerman), writer activists and members of Amnesty and P.E.N (Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Susan Sontag, Muriel Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter), and writers who confronted violence and identified as witnesses (Albert Camus, Czeslaw Milosz, Carolyn Forché, Adrienne Rich, J.M. Coetzee). Parts of this book have been published in American Literary History and German Quarterly.

A second book I am writing is called Refugee Futures, which studies ways that time determines the political life of refugees, and how refugee writers have sought to transform our understanding time, and especially the future. Parts of this book have been published as “Time, Sovereignty, and Refugee Writing” in PMLA (Honorable Mention for the 2022 William Riley Parker Award from the Modern Language Association), and as “Refugee Writing and the Problem of the Future” in The Routledge Handbook to Refugees Narratives (2023) edited by Vinh Nguyen and Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi

A third book I am working on is The Oxford Handbook of Literature and Migration (2025), a collection of 50 essays on literature and migration within a global context, spanning antiquity to the present. I am coediting this volume with Josephine McDonagh (University of Chicago) And Charlotte Sussman (Duke).

I am the editor of a 2020 special issue of  JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory on “Refugee Literatures,” and I wrote the chapter on “Refugees” in the Routledge Companion to Literature and Politics in English (2023) edited by Matthew Stratton.  I have also written for Post45, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.