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Explores notions of personal and cultural identity, and offers an introduction to the work of women in literature, film, dance, and visual art in Germany.
This book introduces American audiences to Germany through the perspectives of members of various ethnic groups within the newly unified country and through the mediation of feminist scholars, documenting the artistic contributions to German cultural identity of ten women writers, filmmakers, dancers, and visual artists.
The work of these artists is presented in various ways: as an opportunity for Germans to explore their own repressed identities, as a portrayal of the complex histories of cultural change which foreigners bring into Germany, as the work of piecing together a minority identity in Germany, as a portrayal of the marginalization of women in the construction of the nation, and as the interpenetration of Eastern and Western European cultures.
These artists subvert the process of forming a singular cultural identity by calling into question the creation of a unified personal identity. They represent, for example, the fragmentation of identity through images of amputation, the arbitrary construction of identity through games of chance, the struggle within the writing self to resist censorship in East Germany, and the protest against a culturally imposed identity based on racial categorization.
The volume's eleven articles address issues of multiculturalism, national and personal identity, and avant-garde art, and reflect on the various ways gender and culture interact in the German context.
"I found the multiplicity of vantage points...stimulating. The objects of analysis are not only culturally diverse, they also originate in a variety of disciplines—literature, theatre, art, film, dance." — Susan Derwin, Department of German, University of California, Santa Barbara
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Karen Jankowsky and Carla Love
PART I
DEFINING AND ERASING THE MARGINS: OVERCOMING ETHNICITY?
Encounters with the Other in German Cultural Discourse: Intercultural Germanistik and Aysel Özakin's Journeys of Exile
Ülker Gökberk
Reinventions of Turkey: Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Life is a Caravanserai
Margrit Frölich
Rethinking Germanness: Two Afro-German Women Journey "Home"
Erin Crawley
PART II
EXPLORING CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS: POSTMODERN STRATEGIES
Is Female to Nation as Nature is to Culture? Bozena Nemcová, Libuse Moníková, and the Female Folkloric
Katie Trumpener
Between "Inner Bohemia" and "Outer Siberia": Libuse Moníková Destabilizes Notions of Nation and Gender
Karen Jankowsky
Ethno-Documentary Discourse and Cultural Otherness in Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia
Shanta Rao
Amputation, Dismembered Identities, and the Rhythms of Elimination: Reading Pina Bausch
Heidi Gilpin
Deconstructing Identity: Eva-Maria Schön's Origin of Species
Barbara C. Buenger
PART III
CONFRONTING GERMAN HISTORY: CONSTITUTING AN IDENTITY IN FASCISM, STATE SOCIALISM, AND IN THE UNITED GERMANY
German National Identity and the Female Subject: Gerlind Reinshagen's German Trilogy
Angelika Czekay
Pièces d'identité : Piecing Together Mother/ Daughter Identities in Jeanine Meerapfel's Malou
Janice Mouton
Patterns of Self-Destruction: Christa Wolf's What Remains and Monika Maron's Flight of Ashes
Sylvia Kloetzer
Coda: When American Feminists Cross Borders
Edited by Karen Jankowsky and Carla Love
Artist Biographies
Contributors
Index