Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde by Caroline Rupprecht

Abstract

Reviewed by: Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde by Caroline Rupprecht Arina Rotaru Caroline Rupprecht. Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde. Peter Lang, 2020. 259 pp. Paper, $63.95. In her latest foray into postwar and contemporary literary productions, comparatist Caroline Rupprecht chooses the contested culinary metaphor of fusion to characterize desirable forms of contact between Germans and racialized others, especially Asian Germans. The author takes issue in particular with representations of Asians as Semitic, orientalized Jews, a conflation she places at the root of contemporary forms of neofascist violence. Through a “call-and-response” metaphor with roots in “African-American slave songs, Indian kirtans and Jewish liturgical services” (6), which she borrows in turn from Tsitsi Jaji’s work, the author foregrounds a dialogic narrative of generations bound to one another within the German-speaking space. In this space, the generations create “new forms of solidarity,” which Rupprecht finds to be an effective mode of engagement with the emerging discipline of Asian-German studies, beyond the postcolonial studies paradigm current in anglophone contexts (14). Rupprecht pairs authors whom she labels “Asian-Germans” with post-war authors who have situated representations of Asian culture in relation to German history. She constructs the book’s chapters as a sequence of would-be intergenerational exchanges around memory, history, and identity between Yoko Tawada and W. G. Sebald, Pham Thi Hoài and Peter Weiss, and Anna Kim and Joseph Beuys. In addition to discussing canonical names, the book also covers authors less known to the wider public—including Pham, a resident of Berlin, and Kim, who grew up in Vienna and now also lives in Berlin—providing welcome additions to any university curriculum. [End Page 129] The book’s theoretical framework is inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, who developed his dialogic theories to counter Stalinist aggression, as well as by Emmanuel Levinas and French sinologist François Jullien, from whom the author borrows the idea of a Daoist-informed “in-between” space to counter violent assimilation of the Other. Rupprecht might have considered responding as well to the problematic ascription of the in-between space to the migrant figure as subsisting in a vacuum. Rupprecht’s use of scale and topography to comment on sites of memory, in particular when focusing on Sebald and Tawada, represents an original contribution. As Rupprecht demonstrates, Sebald uses the Chinese gendered prop analogy to describe the destruction caused by the Holocaust. According to Rupprecht, Tawada’s spaces transcend national identification and engage with subjects that operate outside the human-centered Western philosophical model. Whereas Weiss uses Vietnam as an analogy for German history, Pham tells stories of contemporary Hanoi from the perspective of a male narrator in order to reflect on gender stereotypes and defamiliarize reality through masks. Rupprecht explicitly deconstructs the Eurocentric perspective of postwar German authors against the voices of Asian German writers and their reluctance to “translate” one historical period into another (146). I commend the diversity of the author’s interpretive perspectives: she draws on insights not only from food studies but also from gender and translation studies, memory studies, avant-garde studies, and space studies. The chapters on “discordances,” which bring Beuys and Kim together, highlight several discrepancies in Beuys’s engagement with his National Socialist past and interpret his representation of Eurasia as a substitute for his own fantasies involving expiation of National Socialist guilt. As Rupprecht notes, Eurasia has nothing to do with “Eurasia” as a real space but everything to do with Beuys and Germany. These chapters in particular initiate an important discussion of Beuys’s legacy, which may involve historical whitewashing and instrumentalization of the East–West dialogue. The book is in some respects wanting in its rather marginal references to the avant-garde itself, for instance to the primitiveness of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and the engagement with Fluxus of Beuys and Tawada, the impact of surrealism on Weiss, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s impact on Pham. Rupprecht supplements the book’s fragmented treatment of the avant-garde with additional critical perspectives that resist the embrace of a happy fusion through “new encounters,” drawing [End Page...