The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction

   • Leslie A. Adelson

   Pages 1-30

3. Dialogue and Storytelling

   • Leslie A. Adelson

   Pages 31-77

4. Genocide and Taboo

   • Leslie A. Adelson

   Pages 79-122

5. Capital and Labor

   • Leslie A. Adelson

   Pages 123-170

6. Postscript

   • Leslie A. Adelson

   Pages 171-172

7. Back Matter

   Pages 173-264

   PDF

Challenging the commonplace that suspends migrants between two worlds', this study turns a refreshingly curious eye to complex cultural relations and literary novelties wrought by Turkish migration to Germany. At interpretive and historic crossroads involving dialogue and storytelling, genocide and taboo, and capital and labour in the 1990s. This book illuminates far-reaching imaginative effects that literatures of migration can engender. In critical conversation with Arjun Appadurai, Seyla Benhabib, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, Andreas Huyssen, Dominick LaCapra, Doris Sommer, and many others, Adelson probes history and aesthetics as surprisingly twinned indices of national and global transformation at the millennial turn.

• aesthetics
• Germany
• history
• migration
• transformation

"In this imaginative and original study, devoted to the literature of

Turkish migrants in post-1989 Germany, Leslie Adelson shows how

sociological as well as cultural generalizations about "the Turks" and

"the Turkish migrants" are caught in narratives exacerbating otherness.

She pleads for moving beyond the trope of migrant literature "caught

between two worlds" to examine the "touching tales" of intertwinement,

affection and affiliation voiced in this new Turkish literature." - Seyla Benhabib, Yale University

LESLIE A. ADELSON is Professor and Chair of German Studies at Cornell University, USA.

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