Priscilla Layne

Swiss Postcolonial Literature? Reading Martin Dean's Meine Väter (2003) Through Trauma, Mutism, and Third Space

Thursday, March 5, 2026 - 7pm at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, 67 Erb Street West in Waterloo

Martin Dean’s novel Meine Väter (“My Fathers,” 2003) follows Robert, a Swiss man of Indo-Trinidadian origin, whose daughter’s birth triggers an existential crisis over his uncertain identity. Raised by his Swiss mother and Indo-Trinidadian stepfather, Robert seeks answers from his biological father, Ray. Yet when he finally finds Ray in London, living in a nursing home and mute following a racist attack, Robert’s search becomes an exploration of absence rather than revelation. Robert and his father’s subsequent journey to Trinidad unfolds as a quest for truth that remains unresolved, fragmented across conflicting accounts from relatives, friends, and cultural artefacts. I argue that Dean’s novel employs psychoanalytic and postcolonial frameworks, in particularly trauma, hybridity, dislocation, and Homi Bhabha’s “third space,” to stage the impossibility of recovery and self-coherence. Ray’s muteness functions as both the bodily trace of colonial violence and an aesthetic “void,” positioning Meine Väter as a compelling example of Swiss postcolonial literature.

Part of The Diefenbaker Lectures, a series of talks by leading scholars in German studies.

Priscilla Layne is Professor of German and Director of the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

If you wish to attend, please register by using the link below - there's a reception after the lecture, and we want to make sure everyone gets something to eat and drink!