Motion sickness: Literatures of migration and minorities

This dissertation argues that a broad commonality of thematic, aesthetic and structural concerns exists in the literature of minority authors writing within contemporary contexts of migration. The texts addressed in this study, recent works in German juxtaposed to examples from Anglophone and Francophone literatures, dispute assumptions of stable, monolithic and self-same identity, whether in the land of origin or that of migration. Instead, they expose dominant notions of identity as constructs erasing difference and fluidity.; The first chapter focuses on the representation of the body in the works of the German-Turkish author Emine Sevgi Ozdamar. By foregrounding the abject body, to use Kristeva's term, Ozdamar posits corporeality as the locus of a subjectivity that challenges the disciplining gaze of authority. Furthermore, the unruly body becomes the model for a transgressive writing that calls into question the stable boundaries of the written word. The Francophone author Kateb Yacine provides comparative material from the colonial context to nuance the discussion of the cultural and political signification of the female body in the construction of national identity.; Linguistic hybridity constitutes the broad thematic focus in the second chapter. In texts by Ozdamar and Salman Rushdie, language functions as a primary marker of identity's instability: desires, ideals and projections of pure, proper and correct language are exposed as ideological impositions that repress personal and communal histories of difference.; The third chapter addresses further significant instances of the questioning of identity's stability and self-sameness: The continuous concerns about mobility (Herta Muller and Libuse Monikova) and about the transformations of family, depicted as a bankrupt institution (Rushdie, Alev Tekinay and Carmen-Francesca Banciu), define the thematic scope of two sections of this chapter. Against the "worldliness" of those concerns, metamorphosis, the most radical of literary topoi, similarly foregrounds change and instability, and completes the picture of identity in transit (Rushdie and Yoko Tawada).; Through an emphasis on the intersection of the thematic concerns presented in the individual chapters, this study demonstrates that minority authors from diverse contexts of migration are engaged in a common endeavor of redefining contemporary identity.