Shifting Cartographies: Ethical Nomadism and the Poetry of Dorothea Grünzweig

This article explores the work of the Finnish-based German poet Dorothea Grünzweig, identifying it as "nomadic" in Rosi Braidotti's (1994) sense. But even as Grünzweig's poems enact and celebrate nomadism, which offers a powerful challenge to the rigidity and perniciousness of nationalism, they also expose its perils: isolation, confusion, and a lack of agency. Can nomadism be a relational, ethical, productive condition? Drawing on Sara Ahmed's feminist postmodernist ethics and on ideas concerning epistemology and translation, I argue for the ethical potential of nomadism and of poetry in postmodernism. (EJ)