Getürkte Türken. Karnevaleske Stilmittel im Theater, Kabarett und Film deutsch-türkischer Künstlerinnen und Künstler by Maha El Hissy (review)

In this engaging study, Maha El Hissy draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival, Homi Bhabha's ideas on hybridity and the postcolonial subject, and Judith Butler's reading of gender as performance to analyze the performance of identities and the intersections of ethnicity, gender, and class in select examples of Turkish-German theater, cabaret, and film since 1990. As the title of the study suggests, El Hissy is concerned with Turkish-German production of false or misleading ("getürkte") images as part of a carnivalesque project to undermine hierarchical differences between the center and the periphery. While the application of Bakthin's concept of the carnivalesque to visual performance is not new, the linkage to Bhaba's ideas on hybridity and the postcolonial subject and Butler's work on gender and performance combined with a dash of Katrin Sieg's analysis of ethnic drag and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome model not only highlights El Hissy's familiarity with canonical theory but also offers new insights into how these theories can be productively applied.

The book is divided into six chapters and a brief concluding "Schlusswort." The bibliography provides discrete sections on primary texts, media productions, and secondary literature. The first chapter outlines the theoretical apparatus with a focus on the relevance of the carnivalesque for an investigation of Turkish-German theater, cabaret, and film representing migration as well as transnational and transcultural experience. In the second chapter, El Hissy argues that the concerns with systems of power and the power relations between the center and periphery at the heart of postcolonial theory are relevant for the analysis of Turkish-German cultural production even in the absence of historical connections to colonialism. The following chapter examines the origins of carnival, theories of the carnivalesque, and the play with identity in Turkish German ethno-comedy. El Hissy sees strong parallels between the subversion of gender and class hierarchies in medieval carnival and the destabilization of ethnic categories and assumptions of cultural superiority in ethnic masquerade. The remaining three chapters delve into theoretically grounded, detailed readings of works by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu, Serdar Somunçu, Django Asül, Hussi Kutluçan, and Kutluğ Ataman.

El Hissy selects two plays as the focus for Chapter Four: Özdamar's Keloğlan in Alamania (1991) and Zaimoglu's Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006). El Hissy presents Keloğlan in Alamania as an illustration of how the carnivelesque can be deployed to undermine cultural hierarchies and assumptions of difference. Özdamar's play with intertextuality and language combined with the use of masks and wigs to signal shifts in gender and ethnicity presents a confusion and profusion of identities that in El Hissy's analysis are inspired by questions about integration and the marginalization of migrants in the wake of unification. While the right to residency and fear of deportation are foregrounded in Özdamar's play, Zaimoglu focuses on the volatile image of Muslim women in Western Europe in Schwarze Jungfrauen, where he reconceives virginity as a sign of female autonomy rather than religious oppression. El Hissy reads Zaimoglu's virgins as ambivalent representations that challenge the demure, submissive image of Muslim women and the sexualized fantasy of the exotic, erotic female body. In the process, El Hissy extrapolates from religion to colonialism, figuring the "black virgin" as the "dark continent" (129), a move that seems rather more opportunistic (in light of her overarching project to wed the carnivalesque with postcolonial theory) than compelling based on the content of the play itself.

In the fifth chapter, El Hissy is primarily concerned with the multiple positions the cabaret artist occupies and the impact ethnic identity has on how those positions are perceived. To illustrate this diversity of roles and positions, El Hissy analyzes Serdar Somunçu's staged readings...