{"title":"VON DER ‘MACHT, WELT ZU MACHEN’: RADIKALE DEMOKRATIE IN SHARON DODUA OTOOS ADAS RAUM*","authors":"Alrik Daldrup","doi":"10.1111/glal.12400","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div>\n \n <p>Drawing on Jacques Rancièreʼs radical democratic concept of dissensus, my article centres on the epistemic, affective and verbal forms of resistance depicted in Sharon Dodua Otooʼs debut novel <i>Adas Raum</i>. In four diegetic narrative strands, a police order of the visible and the sayable damages and assimilates the characters’ lives. According to Jamika Ajalon, stories are lost in colonised space, but at the same time self-determined stories have been shared generation after generation in order to stay alive. The everyday of Ada, but also of supposedly minor characters, such as the survivors of the Irish famine Lizzie and Alfie, is not only the site of violent Othering. Interconnected through different historical eras, the characters imagine other worlds at the margins. They develop creative counter-strategies and safer spaces which can be understood, with Davina Cooper, as everyday utopias. I will show that the dissensual tension between experiencing the world as it is and the search for a better future can be seen as a central <i>leitmotif</i> of the novel. By giving back agency to marginalised subjects in narratives of resistance, Otoo's novel can be seen as an aesthetic artefact that brings to life world-making, dissensual images which political activists can appropriate in their fight for equality and freedom.</p>\n </div>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12400","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/glal.12400","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, GERMAN, DUTCH, SCANDINAVIAN","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Drawing on Jacques Rancièreʼs radical democratic concept of dissensus, my article centres on the epistemic, affective and verbal forms of resistance depicted in Sharon Dodua Otooʼs debut novel Adas Raum. In four diegetic narrative strands, a police order of the visible and the sayable damages and assimilates the characters’ lives. According to Jamika Ajalon, stories are lost in colonised space, but at the same time self-determined stories have been shared generation after generation in order to stay alive. The everyday of Ada, but also of supposedly minor characters, such as the survivors of the Irish famine Lizzie and Alfie, is not only the site of violent Othering. Interconnected through different historical eras, the characters imagine other worlds at the margins. They develop creative counter-strategies and safer spaces which can be understood, with Davina Cooper, as everyday utopias. I will show that the dissensual tension between experiencing the world as it is and the search for a better future can be seen as a central leitmotif of the novel. By giving back agency to marginalised subjects in narratives of resistance, Otoo's novel can be seen as an aesthetic artefact that brings to life world-making, dissensual images which political activists can appropriate in their fight for equality and freedom.
期刊介绍:
- German Life and Letters was founded in 1936 by the distinguished British Germanist L.A. Willoughby and the publisher Basil Blackwell. In its first number the journal described its aim as "engagement with German culture in its widest aspects: its history, literature, religion, music, art; with German life in general". German LIfe and Letters has continued over the decades to observe its founding principles of providing an international and interdisciplinary forum for scholarly analysis of German culture past and present. The journal appears four times a year, and a typical number contains around eight articles of between six and eight thousand words each.