Turkish-American and Turkish-German writing occupies a space outside traditional canons and constitutes a rapidly growing minority literature that calls for further study and recognition. In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, Stephen Greenblatt remarks: “Great writers are … specialists in cultural exchange. … They take symbolic materials from one zone of the culture and move them to another, augmenting their emotional force, altering their significance, linking them with other materials taken from a different one, changing their place in a larger social design” (245). Greenblatt’s description of “great writers” applies equally well to the output of such writers as Halide Edip Adivar, Güneli Gün, Elif Shafak, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar who have published highly acclaimed bi-lingual or multilingual fiction, non-fiction, and autobiographies. Building on transnational studies (Azade Seyhan, Wail Hassan, Yasemin Yıldız), cosmopolitan studies (Bruce Robbins, Tim Brennan, Kwame Appiah), and diaspora studies (Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Marianne Hirsch, Andreas Huyssen), I interrogate the role of language(s) in the formation of new global identities. I ask how this transnational canon can be linked to the larger issues of identity, exclusion, memory, language politics, translation, and the psychology of loss and nostalgia. I suggest, a comparative approach to the work of bilingual and multilingual writers will help us go beyond the purely national or period approaches to Middle Eastern literatures. In this presentation, I focus on Gün’s The Book of Trances (1979) and demonstrate this writer’s linguistic, aesthetic, and formal negotiation of traumatic memories in the aftermath of the citizen exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. A lens through which to view theories of postcoloniality, this text questions assumption that predicate displaced subjectivities solely on colonial oppression. Part of a larger book project in which I explore the multilingual canon, this paper also participates in a type of transnational analysis of migratory texts from a position that Ella Shohat has identified as the “liminal zone of exile” (312) between and across multiple, sometimes divergent, often intersecting landscapes and signposts of identification and cultural expression. References Greenblatt, Stephen, Ines G. Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Firederike Pannewick. Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Shohat, Ella. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Gün, Güneli. Book of Trances: A Novel of Magic Recitals. London: J. Friedmann, 1979. Print.