Neuerscheinung: Transcultural Movements in Contemporary German(-Turkish) Literature. Von Özkan Ezli
16. Dezember 2008
In: Asiatische Studien 62 (4) 2008, S. 1135-1145.
In times of migration and globalization, ascriptions of national or cultural identity are subject to radical changes. Literature is a medium through which these changes can be reflected in a sensitive and complex way. In the case of German-Turkish literature, transcultural movements can be observed in the fundamental modifications literary writing has undergone since its beginnings in the 1960s.
While in the l970s and 1980s literary language in German-Turkish texts served the purpose of represention and mediation through description of the loss of home and the search for national and cultural identity, more recent texts, like those by Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoğlu from the 1990s, display a language that questions earlier ascriptions of national and cultural identity in the form of a "joyful defiguration" (R. Barthes), shifts borders and takes German-Turkish literature to a transcultural level.
We may, therefore, identify a shift from representation (constructing and constituting national and cultural identities) to problematization of the notions of nation and culture in an affirmative and metalinguistic way. In this, German-Turkish literature follows the complex movements of migration itself. (Abstract)
Dr. des. Özkan Ezli forscht zu „Narrative Diaspora in der deutsch-türkischen Literatur und im deutsch-türkischen Film: Eine andere deutsche Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte“.