GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

{"title":"GHANAIAN FOLK THOUGHT, AKAN RELIGION AND AN ETHIC OF CARE IN SHARON DODUA OTOO'S ADAS RAUM*","authors":"Kyung-Ho Cha","doi":"10.1111/glal.12399","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12399","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article I will analyse how cosmological myths, proverbs and pictorial symbols from Ghanaian folk thought and religion are adapted in Sharon Dodua Otoo's novel <i>Adas Raum</i>. I will focus primarily on the idea of the transmigration of the soul, which comes from the religion of the Akan people, and on the Sankofa symbol, which stands for a certain attitude towards history. In the novel, Ghanaian wisdom poetry, which traditionally deals with the boundary between life and death and the development of the self within the community, is translated into German prose. I aim to explore the significance of Ghanaian religion and philosophy in shaping the overarching ethical idea underlying <i>Adas Raum</i>. At the heart of this ethical idea is learning from history, which is presented not only as a history of catastrophe but also as a history of mutual care between human beings who support each other in times of inhumanity.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12399","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139035618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"VOCABULARY FOR AN UNTHINKABLE GRAMMAR: SHARON DODUA OTOO'S SYNCHRONICITY","authors":"Stephanie Galasso","doi":"10.1111/glal.12401","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12401","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the eponymous notion of ‘synchronicity’ in Sharon Dodua Otoo's novella, <i>Synchronicity: the original story</i>. Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva's notion of Black Feminist ‘poethics’, I argue that ‘synchronicity’ might serve as a ‘guide’ for the imagination that also expands significant critiques of (post)-Enlightenment notions of temporality (e.g. those by Michelle M. Wright, Rei Terada and Christina Sharpe). It does so, I argue, by exposing the significance of temporality and the related notion of causality for racial constructions of the subject. The blending of temporalities and senses in <i>Synchronicity</i> de-centre the persistent Enlightenment construction of the subject as a causal agent, showing instead the dependence of existence on intricate cycles of loss and gain. To illustrate this, I offer a close reading of <i>Synchronicity</i> alongside analysis of its implicit critique of Enlightenment notions of being and thought. The novella, I argue, offers not only much-needed vocabulary for the contemporary moment and the synchronous vestiges of ‘past’ violence within it but also challenges the ‘modern political grammar’ (Silva) through which racial subjects emerge.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12401","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138826531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"OTHERTONGUES: MULTILINGUALISM, NATALITY AND EMPOWERMENT IN SHARON DODUA OTOO'S ADAS RAUM","authors":"Áine McMurtry","doi":"10.1111/glal.12403","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12403","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Written in German by the Black British author and activist Sharon Dodua Otoo, the novel <i>Adas Raum</i> (2021) intervenes in contemporary debates on colonial legacies to forge ‘a critical multilingualism’ (Yildiz 2012), challenging master-narratives and tropes of founding fathers which privilege linear constructions of time and bounded concepts of nation and peoples. This article examines how Otoo foregrounds diasporic female figures as material agents by focusing on ambivalent experiences of childbearing, then argues that the multilingual feminist text rejects dualistic heteropatriarchal models to reconceive community in terms of intersubjective encounters and shared spaces. To illuminate the politics of Otoo's structural concern with rebirth, I take up the concept of ‘natality’ developed in the writings of Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero, which offers a model for imagining possibilities of political action that defy forms of domination. Black feminist thought further informs the ambivalent figuration of motherhood in Otoo's narrative and its central preoccupation with intertwined issues of gender, racial and class discrimination. Challenging the ethnocentricity that has been identified throughout Arendt's <i>oeuvre</i>, Otoo reveals instead how fifteenth-century West African concepts of space and time can be understood as in dialogue with the post-war philosopher's understanding of natality as the central category of political thought.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12403","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138826604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘VISIONEN VOM IDEALEN GESCHICHTE-SCHREIBEN UND GESCHICHTE-MACHENʼ: EPISTEMIC (IN)JUSTICE AND INSURRECTION IN SHARON DODUA OTOO'S HISTORICAL AND MEMORY ACTIVISM","authors":"Tara Talwar Windsor","doi":"10.1111/glal.12398","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12398","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores Sharon Dodua Otoo's historical and memory activism and demonstrates how she challenges epistemic injustices inflicted by dominant models of cultural memory and identity in Germany, particularly in relation to its colonial history. Such epistemic injustice takes two main forms – the ongoing subjugation of subaltern (hi)stories and the under-acknowledgement of grassroots diasporic activism – resulting in multiple levels of marginalisation and sustaining what the philosopher Charles Mills calls ‘the white epistemology of ignorance’. Building on Sarah Colvin's studies of epistemic resistance in Otoo's literary prose, I argue that Otoo's historical and memory activism is an example of what José Medina refers to as ‘epistemic insurrection’. Otoo's self-consciously collaborative interventions in historical and memory politics facilitate the kind of ‘beneficial epistemic friction’ expounded by Medina, which is necessary to prevent dominant forces from co-opting insurgent counter-histories and counter-memories. Otoo invokes a community of activist experts and poets, past and present, whose collective knowledge production offers alternative ways of thinking about history and opportunities to subvert the power dynamics of cultural memory. Her activism reaches across diverse genres, media and public domains, and engages multiperspectivity to contribute to more pluralistic modes of doing history and memory.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12398","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138826649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"MOTHERS AND OTHERS IN FICTION BY SHARON DODUA OTOO AND OLIVIA WENZEL","authors":"Sarah Colvin","doi":"10.1111/glal.12404","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12404","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article I argue that in recent novels by Sharon Dodua Otoo and Olivia Wenzel the trope of motherhood is engaged to evoke an emancipatory impulse that is paradoxically linked to acknowledging constraint or connectedness. Motherhood is an idea burdened by historical stereotypes, and I argue that Otoo and Wenzel use aesthetic means to subvert gendered and racialising mythologies and controlling assumptions about who can provide nurturing, reinscribing motherhood in ways that depart from Western expectations of an idealised one-on-one relation. Building on Michelle Wright's analysis of Black motherhood as a poetic trope of subversive agency, Theresa Washington's exploration of the West African concept of Ájè in African American women's writing, and Francine Wynn's conception of the chiastic mother-infant relation, I suggest that Otoo and Wenzel show how the trope of motherhood can not only be subversive but (perhaps appropriately) epistemically generative. It can be read as a foundational image for a different epistemological discourse that does not depend on the mastery of difference.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12404","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138691050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"VON DER ‘MACHT, WELT ZU MACHEN’: RADIKALE DEMOKRATIE IN SHARON DODUA OTOOS ADAS RAUM*","authors":"Alrik Daldrup","doi":"10.1111/glal.12400","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12400","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <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>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12400","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138690912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"BLACKNESS AND DIS/ABILITY IN THE AFROFUTURIST CHRISTMAS NOVELLA SYNCHRONICITY (2015) BY SHARON DODUA OTOO*","authors":"joseph kebe-nguema","doi":"10.1111/glal.12397","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12397","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Charlie, the main character in Sharon Dodua Otoo's Afrofuturist Christmas novella <i>Synchronicity</i>, is a Black single mother of Ghanaian heritage working as a graphic designer in Berlin who has spent her whole life feeling the constraints of her ancestral traditions. When one day she starts losing her ability to see colours, she cannot disclose that family-specific dis/ability since it would have professional and material consequences. Charlie embarks on a journey of self-reflection, in the course of which she will realise that something that at first seemed to be a loss could, in fact, be a blessing in disguise. My essay analyses the intersection of Blackness and dis/ability in <i>Synchronicity</i> through the lens of DisCrit: a theoretical approach associating Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory, and argues that Otoo's novella manages to effectively depict the intersections regarding the onset of an invisible dis/abilty as well as Blackness and diasporic experiences, while an Afrofuturist reading of the novella allows us to consider it as a story based on hope, self-acceptance and the need for community.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12397","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138690911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"INTRODUCTION: SHARON DODUA OTOO – LITERATURE, POLITICS, POSSIBILITY","authors":"Sarah Colvin,&nbsp;Tara Talwar Windsor","doi":"10.1111/glal.12396","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12396","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Sharon Dodua Otoo is one of the most visible and influential writers currently working in Germany. She was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 and the Medal of Merit of the city-state of Berlin (Verdienstorden des Landes Berlin) in 2022.</p><p>Otoo came to prominence in the German-speaking world with her Bachmann-prizewinning short story ‘Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin’, which has since been published in the original German alongside English translations and recently in a new German-language edition.1 Two novellas –<i>The Things I am Thinking While Smiling Politely</i> and <i>Synchronicity</i> – had appeared prior to that, both in Otoo's original English and in German translations by Mirjam Nuenning.2 Her first full-length novel, <i>Adas Raum</i>, appeared in the original German with S. Fischer in 2021. The novel was shortlisted for the <i>Das Debut</i> prize in 2021 and was one of NDR-Kultur's best books of 2021.3 A Dutch-language translation appeared in 2022 and Japanese and English-language translations (as <i>Ada's Room</i> in North America and <i>Ada's Realm</i> in the UK) in 2023. Otoo's international profile as a writer is reflected in residencies and honours outside Germany: she is a Visiting Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and she was the Schröder Writer-in-Residence at the University of Cambridge in 2022 and the Max Kade Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania in 2023.</p><p>Like the literary predecessor she admires, Toni Morrison,4 Otoo is a politically engaged writer with an academic background in the literature she contributes to (Morrison took a degree in English Literature, Otoo in German). She has spoken about and published numerous essays on the issues faced by Black writers and artists in contemporary Germany, and makes regular interventions through print, broadcast and social media in public discussions on feminism, class, colonialism and identity. She has served on the board of the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) and is affiliated with the Black queer-feminist organisation ADEFRA; both associations have been at the forefront of the Afro-German movement since the mid-1980s.5 In this context, Otoo draws on and extends the legacy of the pioneering Afro-German poet-activist May Ayim, another literary predecessor whom Otoo regularly cites as a key influence and role model.</p><p>When in 2022 she was awarded the Berlin medal, the press release from the Mayor's office pointed explicitly to both her artistic and her political interventions: ‘Sharon Dodua Otoo erhält den Verdienstorden des Landes Berlin in Anerkennung und Würdigung hervorragender Verdienste durch ihre künstlerischen und politischen Interventionen in Berlin und darüberhinaus.’6 That partnering of life and letters, art and politics seems key to an understanding of Otoo's work and is a recurrent theme in this special issue of <i>German Life and Letters</i> as the first-ever dedicated volume to address Otoo's <i>oeuvre<","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12396","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139005376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"BETWEEN THE ORBITS: TRANSLATING SHARON DODUA OTOO'S ADAS RAUM","authors":"Jon Cho-Polizzi","doi":"10.1111/glal.12402","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12402","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines theoretical and practical questions involved in the translation of Sharon Dodua Otoo's transnational and polyphonic novel <i>Adas Raum</i>. Using translation theory and the Benjaminian notion of a translation's ‘Fortleben’, I build on my concept of ‘conversive reading’, as well as on extensive real-time collaboration with Otoo and fellow translators to ask: How does one negotiate questions of identity, positionality and voice in a work whose narrative so intricately intertwines these dimensions? How can the literary inheritance which informs a source text influence its translation into the target language? To what extent must a successful translation move away from the source text to facilitate its nuances in the target language? Expanding on the experience and practice of translating this novel, I demonstrate that my understanding of translation as an ongoing process represents a renegotiation of the source – building upon a work's literary forebears and diverging, when necessary, from the language of the source to best facilitate voice and reception in the cultural context of the target language.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.12402","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138690986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"THE LATE ARRIVAL OF ‘DER DEUTSCHE PROUST’: TRANSLATING A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU INTO GERMAN","authors":"Ian Ellison","doi":"10.1111/glal.12392","DOIUrl":"10.1111/glal.12392","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Marcel Proust's <i>A la recherche du temps perdu</i>, an unparalleled chronicle of European modernity's transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, was published between 1913 and 1927. It was not until the 1950s, however, that a complete German translation of the novel appeared. Earlier attempts did not get far: Rudolph Schottlaender's 1925 translation of the first volume was critically panned, and the subsequent translation of the next two volumes by Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel was unfortunately curtailed by the rise of Nazism and these writers’ untimely deaths. A full rendering into German of Proust's <i>magnum opus</i> was only completed between 1953 and 1957 by Eva Rechel-Mertens. Reconstructing the upheavals of the translation history of Proust's <i>Recherche</i> into German, this article also draws on archival research into Rechel-Mertens’ literary estate, held at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, to ask to what extent it was already too late for a German readership to be introduced to a German Proust, as Peter Suhrkamp once wrote to Rechel-Mertens. Examining behind-the-scenes correspondence between publishers, translators and critics, this essay investigates the seemingly random and turbulent history of the late emergence of a ‘deutscher Proust’ and the implications of this for modern German – and, indeed, European – literature.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47262084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}