Anti-Blackness, Canonicity, and (Mis-)Identification in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum

Abstract

This essay explores the disturbing presence of anti-Black language and tropes in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's recent, celebrated novel Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum. Drawing on Toni Morrison's classic analysis in Playing in the Dark, I argue Özdamar's anti-Blackness is characterized by a double-valence: on one hand, Özdamar's anti-Blackness partakes of the racializing clichés anatomized by Morrison and stakes a claim to whiteness and canonicity on their basis; on the other, this anti-Blackness is continuous with a tendency towards racialized self-mockery in the whole of Özdamar's oeuvre, as if Özdamar imagined these scenes to be produced from within Blackness and/or as a gesture of minoritarian solidarity. The text is structured by a problematic (mis-)identification with Black abjection and a desire for whiteness. Özdamar thus participates in both an avant-gardist tradition of transgression and a liberal logic of post-raciality in which racializing tropes are free for unlimited literary appropriation.