Abstract
This chapter analyses fictional engagements with the history and memory of labor migration by way of three novels by contemporary German-language writers of Turkish descent: Fatma Aydemir, Dilek Güngör and Deniz Utlu). Their novels are part of a larger recent cultural “revival and reanimation” (Sun, Foreword: Archival Engagement. TRANSIT 13 (2): i–v, 2022) of the Turkish German archive, which critically complements dominant national narratives of belonging and identity, while also (re-)activating the forgotten possibilities of marginalized historical experiences in an attempt to open up alternative futures. Focusing on a range of prominent themes and tropes that permeate all three novels, this analysis examines the tensions between private and public, as well as marginalized and canonical, archives, alongside exploring different generational memories and positionalities. The chapter investigates how literary memory work intersects with questions of both legal and symbolic (non-)citizenship, arguing that the three novels create literary (counter-)archives that enable mnemonic repair and cultural recognition. As such, they perform artistic “acts of citizenship” (Isin and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship. London and New York: Zed Books, 2008); these have the potential to open alternative, future-oriented possibilities of being in the world and with others, while also empowering new claims to belonging in contemporary, “postmigrant” Germany.
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Notes
- 1.
Fatima El-Tayeb (2011) notes that the label “migrant background” is problematic because it perpetuates non-arrival for migrating subjects and their descendants, as well as for migrantized subjects, reducing them to “a flat, one-dimensional existence in which she or he always has just arrived” (4).
- 2.
DOMiD thus has come a long way from its beginnings as a volunteer organization seeking to document the history of the numerically most significant labor migration movement to Germany, i.e., Turkish migration, in the absence of any official documentation (see DOMiD, “Über uns”).
- 3.
The term “migrantized” is used by, among others, Fatima El-Tayeb (2016) to describe the mechanisms by which certain (often non-white) populations are othered as “foreign” even if they were born in a particular country and do not have first-hand experience of migration. Migrantization forces these populations into a perpetual state of non-arrival and non-belonging (often including non-citizenship) in the imagined and actual community of the nation. The term highlights that categories such as “migration” and “migrant” are not objective but socially and culturally negotiated and can be attached to certain subjects and populations with deeply political effects.
The terms “postmigrant” or “postmigration” are used by scholars and activists as a tool and lens to acknowledge and articulate processes of pluralization in societies that have been shaped by large-scale migration movements. The aim for many proponents is to promote both epistemological and normative changes, to better accommodate this pluralization. As such, postmigration advocates for a shift in perspective that understands our present-day societies as fundamentally shaped by movement and migration, rather than by a sedentary culture and lifestyle. For more detailed discussions of the term see Foroutan (2019), Gaonkar et al. (2021), Römhild (2017) and Schramm et al. (2019). For another chapter that discusses “postmigration,” see Garloff in this volume.
- 4.
I borrow the term “Erinnerungsarbeit” [memory work] from Brunow (2011) who herself takes inspiration from Annette Kuhn (187, FN 11).
- 5.
Aydemir and Utlu, for example, also work as journalists, cultural producers, and activists, and they are active on social media.
- 6.
The idea that the negative emotions experienced by certain marginalized subjects may fuel critical engagement with wider socio-cultural and discursive conditions is supported by Sara Ahmed’s work, particularly her thoughts on happiness as a “duty” that weights especially heavily on marginalized subjects (2010). Ahmed introduces the figure of the “melancholic migrant” (2010, 121–159), who refuses to let go of the injury caused by, for example, the experience of racist discrimination, thereby becoming alienated from the world surrounding them. I see Utlu’s main character as a variation of this figure; he is a “melancholic postmigrant.” For another chapter that engages with the figure of the “melancholic migrant,” see Sarnelli in this volume.
- 7.
I am using the masculine pronoun here, as most of the laborers working under the conditions that Berger and Mohr describe—i.e., in factories and doing other kinds of strenuous physical labor—were male. For another essay that engages with Berger and Mohr’s work, see Arsenjuk in this volume.
- 8.
- 9.
The creation of an alternative archive also comes up in Vater und ich, in which Ipek undertakes an interview-project with first-generation migrant workers to get closer to the lived experience of her father. Compared to Utlu’s and Aydemir’s work, this archive, however, connects less with “multidirectional” acts of memory, which is why I will be focusing on The Indignant Ones and on Djinns.
- 10.
This group is a reference to the existing “36 Boys.” Considered by some as a semi-criminal gang of immigrant youth that was active in the 1980s and 1990s in Berlin-Kreuzberg, others, such as Utlu (“Ins Herz”), perceive them as part of an anti-racist movement of (non-)citizen activists.
- 11.
Utlu himself notes: “The fact that the two [Elyas and Aylin] are able to find common ground is more important than their love relationship. Their story is about solidarity” (see Schreiner 2017).
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Roca Lizarazu, M. (2024). Literary Archives and Alternative Futures. Memories of Labor Migration in Contemporary Turkish German Fiction. In: Stan, C., Sussman, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_18
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