Seminar 7 coordinator: UM Professor Silke-Maria Weineck (German and Comparative Literature)
When Karen Majewski was re-elected mayor of Hamtramck in 2016, she thanked her audience in seven languages: English, Polish, Arabic, Albanian, Bengali, Bosnian, and Ukrainian. Hamtramck, all two square miles of it, is a city within a city. Like the neighboring Highland Park, it incorporated in the 1920s to fend off annexation by Detroit, which now surrounds Hamtramck on all sides. And like Detroit, its fortunes rose and fell with the fate of the car industry ever since the Dodge Plant attracted thousands of Polish immigrants in the 1910s and 1920s, pushing out the Germans who had dominated the community until then. Later waves brought Bangladeshi, Yemeni, Albanians, Bosnians, Macedonians, Ukrainians, Iraqi Chaldeans and others.
Little known outside of Michigan, Hamtramck made international news when it elected the first majority Muslim city council in the US in 2015, leading to breathless coverage not just in the right-wing media. On Breitbart, Pamela Geller warned ominously that “everywhere Muslims have held political power, non-Muslims have suffered – suffered loss of life, or property, income, social standing, or equal rights before the law.” Talk of “Shariaville” spread on social media, and even CNN asked Majewski, to her bafflement, if she was afraid of being in her own city. Hamtramck has reacted with equanimity, meeting the hostility with its sunny tagline, “The World in Two Square Miles.” In the session on “translating Hamtramck” we will seek to understand the opportunities and challenges of a small, radically multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious community as well as its relationship to the City of Detroit, itself a global urban site.
Please join us on Sunday, April 30th, 2023 at the bookstore co-op Book Suey, for the last Mellon Sawyer Seminar event of the year:
Hamtramck Harmony: A Multilingual Poetry Reading
Featuring music and readings in Arabic, Bangla, English, Macedonian, Hmong, Polish, Shona and Ndebele, Ukrainian, Dutch.
Reception catered by local restaurants will follow the readings.
