Natascha Rempel is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Romance Philology at Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany) and a member of the Centre for Atlantic and Global Studies (LUH, Hannover). Her research interests include 20th- and 21st-century Latin American literature, particularly Caribbean literature, literary magazines, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and intermedial and digital productions. In her doctoral project (Die klandestine Zeitschrift Diáspora(s). Netzwerke, Textnetze und Protestkultur der kubanischen Sonderperiode, De Gruyter 2025), she combines close and distant reading to investigate the Diáspora(s) project as a network-magazine in the context of Cuban literature during the Special Period. She was a member of the board of directors of the German Society for Caribbean Studies (Socare, 2018–2023). She is co-editor of the volume Netzwerke – Werknetze. Transareale Perspektiven auf relationale Ästhetiken, Akteure und Medien (1910–1989) (Georg Olms Verlag 2021), and of the volume Politics of Education in the Caribbean and its Diasporas (in press). 

Research project as a CALAS fellow (Knowledge Laboratory “A region in motion: Accelerated human mobilities and multiple circulations in Latin America and the Caribbean”)

Title: Spaces in transit − imaginaries in motion: An (audio)visual and media analysis of mobility and mobilization in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 21st century

Abstract: The project will investigate the intermedial staging of migration and transnational mobilities in recent Latin American media culture. It will analyze how different multimodal discourses seek to negotiate and reconfigure a glocal imaginary in the face of migration flows and debates in Latin America and the Caribbean. A selection of pop music video clips, road movies, and graphic novels will be studied. The focus will be on the synchronization of verbal (even musical) and visual discourse, especially in the staging of spatiality, as well as on the transmission and dissemination of opposing perspectives on mobility in its different layers. It will be argued that (new) media are used as (informal) measures of (inter)cultural education to activate a transnational audience and raise awareness of the region's diversity, deconstructing neocolonial images and discourses. In this way, the project aims to broaden a literary and academic perspective towards the multiple facets of (trans)regional mobilities, focusing on the various forms of artivism that address the region's colonial past and current crises, and that seek to redefine “Latin Americanism” in the artistic and digital space.