6l2 Reviews Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions. By Tom Cheesman. (Studies inGerman Literature, Linguistics and Culture) Rochester, NY: Cam den House. 2007. $75; ?45. ISBN 978-1-57113-374-8. Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny toPamuk. By B. Venkat Mani. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2007. 272 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-1-58729-584-3. These major monographs on Turkish-German literatureboth take cosmopolitanism as their point of departure, each reclaiming the term's positive genealogy, while qualifying it inways relevant to contemporary Germany. Both pay tribute to Leslie Adelson's The Turkish Turn inContemporary German Literature (Basingstoke: Pal graveMacmillan, 2005), which argued for recognition ofTurkish-German literature as an intrinsic part ofGerman culture. Both also go beyond her book in significant ways: Cheesman takes his cue from her view of thiswriting as a 'technology of localisation' to jettison the term 'migration' and emphasize instead the permanent settlement of the Turkish-German population; Mani shares her theoretical preoc cupation with the limitations of realism. Unlike Adelson, however, neither author hesitates to refer to the Turkish cultural contexts of the writing, while both are careful to avoid reducing it to its ethnic' origins. Beyond that, the books could hardly be more different:while Mani's is theoretically more ambitious, its scope is relatively narrow; Cheesman's book provides a comprehensive tourd'horizon of Turkish-German novels since 1979, deeming almost all of them cosmopolitan' in one way or another, which arguably reduces the term's analytical purchase. None the less, taken together theywill be essential reading for scholars and students both within and beyond German Studies, and could thereforeboth be said to contribute to the discipline's own cosmopolitanization. The title of Cheesman's book refers specifically to the Zuwanderungsgesetz of 2004, which recognized settlement for the firsttime as the goal of immigration, and more generally to Turkish-German literature's negotiation of a new place in German culture. Restrictions on dual citizenship forTurks inGermany which came into force in 2005, on the other hand, signal that 'the emergent Turkish German literatureof settlement can only take an ironic view of "cosmopolitanism" or "world citizenship'" (p. 20). The book shares Zafer ?enocak's political commitment to the process of'extending the concept of Germanness' (p. 12), which Turkish-German literature is ina position todo by provoking debate, and by developing itsown exten sive intertextual framework of reference. Cheesman favours the term cosmopolitan' (or itsolder form 'cosmopolite') over the 'intercultural paradigm' still dominant in German Germanistik, which posits 'discrete, ethnic and national cultural entities that connect through acts of translation and dialogue' (p. 34), and is upheld by euphemisms (or 'polite fictions') such as Gastarbeiter or auslandische Mitbilrger. Cheesman understands cosmopolitanism as a 'mode of being and consciousness', a 'skeptical attitude toward ideologies of nation, race, and religion coupled with a curiosity about difference' (p. 43), while also arguing that that there are diverse, discrepant, and more or less 'rooted' cosmopolitanisms. Prominent among these MLR, 104.2, 2009 613 iswhat he terms the left-liberal Atlanticist cosmopolitanism' towhich, ultimately, themajority of authors and texts discussed offer littleor no challenge. Instead of the celebration of the diversity of Turkish German writing which the reader might expect, therefore,much of the text isdevoted to exposing its failure to bring about the desired transformation of the concept ofGermanness. The outstanding excep tion is thewriter and transnational public intellectual Zafer ?enocak, the only one towhom a whole chapter is devoted, and whose uncomfortable critical cosmopo litanism' is held in part responsible for his unpopularity as an author of fiction. Other chapters are chronological (Chapter 4) or thematic and contrastive, exploring different constellations of 'testimonial' writing (Chapter 6) and of depictions of the 1/ncosmopolitan Turkish worker as Ali' (Chapter 7). The last of these provides a welcome corrective to the relative neglect ofAras Oren's oeuvre in the critical litera ture, but the book's imaginative structure does give rise to considerable overlap. Cheesman's best analyses are where he engages with the nuances of language and style, as he does to great effectwith ?enocak and Feridun Zaimoglu, but there is relatively littleof this attention to detail indiscussions of other authors...