Politics of Home and Bodily Corporeality in Soul Kitchen: Toward a New Reading of Fatih Akin's Heimatfilm

Abstract

The contentious concept Heimat—the German word for home(land)—is often considered to generate autochthonous, exclusionary, and regressive significations and holds a notable presence in far-right politics. In this article, I delineate new methods to engage this term in ways that inflect it with more critical, progressive, and democratic significations. Affect theory, I argue, helps unsettle the radical sentiments and implications that Heimat may evoke in the postmigrant era. Centralizing Fatih Akın's Soul Kitchen and attending to affects and episodes of bodily breakdown in it, I demonstrate how this concept offers a productive register to address systemic issues within society and to assess complexities of what I call trans-diasporic engagements. This reading sheds further light on Akın's cinematic praxis. It demonstrates how, already with Soul Kitchen, his filmography adopts a new trajectory and develops a structural critique of German society, its institutions, norms, and practices.