Abstract
Since the 1990s, German Studies—whether conceived as a philological, intercultural, or comparative field—has been fundamentally reorganized by what Tom Cheesman calls “Turkish settlement” (2007) and by what Leslie Adelson calls German literature’s “Turkish turn”(2005). Nonetheless, preponderant modes of German statescraft, cultural policy, naturalization schemata, and literary production continue to selectively incorporate a closed set of Turkish “cultural fables” (Brown 2003). These are sometimes referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as the ‘food, folklore, and fun’ model of interculturality. Simultaneously, however, a much more profound and unspectacular transformation can be traced in the way ethnic Germans and post-migrant German Turks practice civic and cultural autochthony in the wake of mass Turkish migration, giving way to a chronic and productive Unbehagen in Almanya (unsettledness in Germany) that often eludes scholarly attention. This talk will call on the Berlin-based author Zafer ?enocak’s Turkish-language novellas Ko?k (The Residence, 2008) and Alman Terbiyesi (German Education, 2007) as figural touchstones through which to explore the following questions: 1) What domains of Turkish-German historical subjectivity remain impervious to public representation and scholarly analysis in 2013, and why? 2) What epistemological and methodological lacunae persist in the way German Studies operationalizes its intercultural and/or comparative “Turkish turn”? 3) What projects, curricular transformations, and research trajectories might emerge from a serious disciplinary engagement with the first two questions?
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