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introduction Cosmopolitical Claims The literature of guest workers . . . offers the possibility to see our problem not as the individual problem of a Mustafa from Istanbul or a Jannis from Kilkis, but as a collective problem of over 4 million, yes, 60 million citizens of the Federal Republic. franco biondi and rafik schami, “literatur der betroffenheit” Europe is the reflection of my countenance, and contrariwise: I am the reflection of the countenance of Europe. My speechlessness is that of its own. My search for a new language contributes to the fact that it [Europe] can resolve its speechlessness at the borders of the language. aras ören, “dankrede zur prelsverleihung” At the 2002 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University, Salman Rushdie returned to evaluating frontiers.1 “The frontier is an elusive line,” he claimed,“visible and invisible, physical and metaphorical, amoral and moral. . . . To cross a frontier is to be transformed” (Step across This Line 352). Rushdie proceeded to call the frontier“a wake-up call,”“the physical proof of the human race’s divided self,”the place where the“world’s secret truths move unhindered every day”(ibid. 353). Through these pronouncements, Rushdie becomes the purveyor of the bittersweet irony of frontiers that marks the beginning of the new millennium . Rushdie makes his statements in what has come to be known as the Post-9/11World,a world where frontiers,boundaries,and borders dividing nations, cultures, religions, ethnicities, and languages have suddenly reacquired visibility and clarity. Reacquired, I emphasize, because in the early 1990s,as the iron curtain came down and silicon drapes went up,the information highway created the illusion of a connected, unified, and glorified global village, a postnational view of the world. Furthermore, in the wake of mass migration from Asia and Africa, metropolitan centers of Europe and North America were optimistically envisaged as miniature versions of this global village; peaceful coexistence of heterogeneous populations was ★   promoted by intellectual and political investment in multiculturalism. The terms global- and multi- prefixed our imagination of varied cultures and communities peacefully coexisting in close proximity, purportedly breeding (hybrid) lilacs out of the dead sand of tolerance, mixing hopes and desires of natives and foreigners alike. UNESCO’s World Culture Report, 2000 is a classic document of how illusions of cultural diversity and pluralism continue to raise the hopes of blurring cultural frontiers and national boundaries, even as the ill-treatment of immigrants of color or with Muslim(-sounding) names is business as usual at ports of entry into Europe and North America. After the reinitiation of the brown–white racial divide in 2001, as the United States prepared itself for the great ideological bifurcation of the red and blue states—to be uncovered in the presidential election of 2004—the continent of Europe was in a bid to redefine its internal boundaries.Disregarding U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s divisive distinction of “old” and “new,” Europe was well on its way to celebrating manifestations of its economic and political unity, barring, of course, the difficult subject of cultural unity. Europe shared with the United States, its transatlantic partner, unease about the presence and participation of non–JudeoChristian immigrants in its unified composition. This unease had been manifested before in terms of a threat to the enlightened,secular character of Europe immediately following the fatwa on Salman Rushdie in 1989; in terms of the headscarf debate in Germany and France in the late 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century; and through the threat of Islamic terrorism in Europe and the United States—even more intensely palpable after the bombings in London in July 2005 and various uncovered terrorist plots since then. As the war on terror acquired the new appellation of a “global struggle against violent extremism” (Packer 33), once again in Rushdie’s terms, invisible frontiers became visible again, and lines dividing human races reacquired their traditional qualifications: national, religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic. The resurgence of these metaphysical and moral frontiers since the beginning of the new millennium might have seemed the source of an inescapable pessimism. Yet for an author like Rushdie, the possibility of escaping their boundaries presents itself in literature in stepping across linguistic , geographical, and cultural lines, forming new affiliations while retaining the old ones, redefining the traditional and the modern, and thus transforming oneself. In the second part of his lecture, Rushdie zoomed in on language as...

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