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Shifting Cartographies: Ethical Nomadism and the Poetry of Dorothea Grünzweig
- Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 21, 2005
- pp. 241-259
- 10.1353/wgy.2005.0011
- Article
- Additional Information
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)