In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

two Slouching Histories, Lurking Memories Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne Starren zur Erde “GDR border-patrol, your travel-documents, please.” “Are we in East Germany already?” “In the German Democratic Republic,” said the young policeman. “I love Brecht.” He didn’t say anything. emine sevgi özdamar, seltsame sterne These lines from Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s novel Seltsame Sterne Starren zur Erde (Strange Stars Stare toward the Earth) reconstruct the (Turkish) firstperson narrator’s reentry into Germany through the former GDR. The re-, as it prefixes the words construct and entry, denotes an event that has been experienced in the past and is now being rehearsed to invoke the memory of that past event. The awkward exchange between the narrative I and the border-patrol officer immediately leads to a moment in German history that has been subordinated. Refracted through the Turkish narrator, this moment does not invoke immediate nostalgia.The sternness of the borderpatrol officer,when retold,offers little recuperation.The exchange takes the reader out of the comfort zone of easy identification. There is no description of history here; the allusion offered by the reconstructive narrative of memory offers a certain discomfiture. What is the nature of this discomfiture ? What kind of memory work insinuates this discomfiture? This chapter is an attempt to comprehend the work and political claims of memory when considered through cosmopolitan conjectures that do not strive for universalism, objectivity, and authenticity but acknowledge difference. Through my discussion of Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne, I try to understand claims of minoritarian cosmopolitanism and memory when the story of migration is,as Ulrich Beck writes,less about origins and destinations than about somewhere in between. ★ In “Acting Bits/Identity Talk,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us that “what we call experience is a staging of experience” (“Acting Bits” ★   158). This staging appears for Spivak in the tenacity of the word origin— national, ethnic—a word that becomes “the strongest account of the agency or mechanics of the staging of experience-in-identity” (ibid.). Having cited the “pernicious” formulation of this interpretation of origin —“you cannot help acting this way because your origin stages you so”—Spivak moves to re-cite herself and revise her own previously authored statement: “history lurks in it [origin] somewhere” is rewritten as “history slouches in it, ready to comfort and kill” (ibid., original emphasis). Through this moment of re-citation and revision, Spivak argues for an understanding of origins through a reexamination of institutions and inscriptions in order to then “surmise the mechanics by which such institutions and inscriptions can stage such a particular style of performance” (ibid.). While Spivak duly acknowledges that this mode of examination of origins “secures the minority voice in Anglo cultures,” she does not resist alerting readers to the possibility that this mode “also reveals the manipulation of the very same minorities into superpower identification in the violent management of global cultural politics” (ibid.). Thus, the very possibility of assertion of agency by a minority artist through protest conveys the impossibility of agency, the staging of the “experience of history,” of “origin.” The danger of pursuing a fixated, limited politics of identity lies in the perception that the terrain of intercultural translation occurs almost automatically through the assertion of cultural difference by the cultural Other through self-representation. Spivak admonishes that this illusion of a harmless and easy translation carries the potential of becoming absolute, cemented, and that this very “absolute interculturalism” quickly results in the cooptation of the artist by“imperialist malevolence”(“Acting Bits”159). Spivak offers these remarks to bridge two important moments in her essay: the first moment signifies her self-identification as a Bengali, whereby she discusses her deconstructive reading strategies in Bengali (her mother-tongue) in her home state of West Bengal in India.1 The second moment—more important for our discussion here—is one of enforced, almost immediate betrayal of self-identification, a disidentification , a detachment, a sudden distancing from the origin, instigated by videographic art of the Lebanese-Canadian artist Jamelie Hassan. Not only does Hassan’s installation Midnight’s Children—her treatment of Salman Rushdie’s famous novel of the same name—remove the novel from its direct historical and cultural context of the partition of India; for the critical viewer Spivak,2 it challenges any easy transcoding of identity as a person of Indian origin born in pre-Independence India who wit88 ★ slouching histories, lurking memories...

Share