Representations of the Other: An Intersectional Analysis of Julya Rabinowich's Die Erdfresserin (2012)

Abstract

Taking concepts of transcultural memory as its point of departure, this article explores how Julya Rabinowich's novel Die Erdfresserin addresses processes of othering and mechanisms that exclude and suppress the history and stories of displaced women from collective memory. The article seeks to demonstrate Rabinowich's specific aesthetic contribution to a new ethics of remembrance in the post-migrant era that refuses to play different stories of violence off against each other. By revealing marginalized memory narratives and entering into dialogue with the modern canon of the Austrian nation-state, Rabinowich transforms its cultural archive, assumed to be static and homogeneous, into a dynamic narrative space.