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  • Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk
  • Mine Eren (bio)
Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. By B. Venkat Mani. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. 272 pp. Cloth $39.95.

B. Venkat Mani's Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk covers ground familiar to anyone interested in multiculturalism and minority and transnational studies. Mani's book, with its focus on recent debates on texts by Turkish-German authors, is both a critique and celebration of the discussions surrounding this literature. Mani, an assistant professor in the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, takes us on a stimulating tour through the latest research on cultural hybridity, subalternity, and diasporic memory. His cosmopolitical analysis is a reaction to the numerous scholarly debates that followed the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1991). What makes the book important, and in many ways, even remarkable, is the breadth of the author's analysis of contemporary theory, through which he seeks to familiarize his reader with key terms and the methodological differences within post-colonial and German studies. To this end, Mani sketches the perspectives of thinkers from Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rey Chow, Leslie Adelson, Azade Seyhan, to Deniz Göktürk and many others to shed light on the question of cultural interaction. One differentiating feature of Mani's study is its goal "to think through difference without indulging in the triumphant vocabularies of multicultural inclusions or the defeatist critiques of monocultural exclusions" (7). [End Page 676]

Mani organizes his book around four chapters. He invokes concepts of home, belonging, and cultural citizenship to evaluate the literary claims in four novels, arguing that these concepts have different aesthetic and ideological valences for different authors. According to Mani, modes of engagement with national, cultural, and ethnic difference in metropolitan cities such as Berlin and Istanbul vary in the writings of Sten Nadolny, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Orhan Pamuk. While Nadolny and Pamuk's narratives tackle the subject of a homogenous and ethnocentric idea existent in their national culture, Özdamar and Zaimoglu address the question of migrant experience and in doing so "register their thinking and feeling through and beyond the German nation" (5). What connects these narratives, however, is that they "defy easy categorization into a national, an ethnic, a cultural, or even a transcultural literature." (6)

The first chapter explores the question of subalternity. Mani's "interests lie in the claims" to trespass "the legitimacy and validity of self-representation" (65). His reading of Nadolny's Selim oder die Gabe der Rede (1990) [Selim; or, The Gift of Speech] focuses on the struggle between Alexander (the narrator and representer) and Selim (the subject of the narration and the represented). In questioning the relationship between them, Mani lays bare the exchange mechanisms between the majority self (Alexander) and the marginal other (Selim). Taking theories by Spivak, Derrida, and Bhabha into consideration, Mani claims that Selim represents the subject of Alexander's narration and functions "as a substructure of an emerging recognition of the two as integral parts of the same polity" (38). In introducing the term narraphasia into the discussion, Mani suggests that the narrator infuses modes of self-interrogation into the narrative in order to make reference to his inability to write and represent the other.

Invoking Spivak's expression "the slouching of history," Mani reshapes the discussion regarding "the mechanics of institutions and inscriptions that force a particular kind of performance in securing the voice of the minorities" (89). In examining Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (2003) [Strange Stars Stare Toward the Earth] by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Mani illustrates how self-representation and political claims function in this novel. Specifically, Özdamar's reference to a brief period of German Democratic Republic's cultural history becomes the focal point for Mani's analysis. Mani favors the idea that the narrator's diasporic memory intervenes in the host nation's past, revealing subaltern pasts through a combination of [End Page 677] recuperation and recherché. Referencing Andreas Huyssen's...

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