Reviewed by: Postkoloniale Lektüren. Perspektivierungen deutschsprachiger Literatur ed. by Anna Babbka and Axel Dunker Mark W. Rectanus Postkoloniale Lektüren. Perspektivierungen deutschsprachiger Literatur. Edited by Anna Babbka and Axel Dunker. (Postkoloniale Studien in der Germanistik. Edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Axel Dunker. Vol. 4.) Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. Pp. 201. Paper €29.80. ISBN 978-3849810023. This volume includes selected essays based on research that was presented at the XII. Kongress der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (2010). In the introduction, editors Anna Babbka and Axel Dunker underscore the wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches that are currently used in the field of postcolonial studies, many of which intersect with intercultural studies (7–8). This diversity is [End Page 228] indeed reflected in the essays published in the volume. Among the many approaches that have emerged in postcolonial studies, the editors identify two directions in literary studies of the postcolonial: 1) readings of colonial and postcolonial texts per se and how those texts construct social and historical contexts; 2) readings and interpretations of tropes, structures, and characters that are constitutive of postcolonial discourses, but are not limited to postcolonial literature (8–9). With regard to the latter, the editors reference discursive linkages to issues of migration, diaspora, and exile in colonial and postcolonial analyses. In this volume, the boundaries between postcolonial and intercultural analyses are, as the editors observe, very fluid. Rather than attempting to define those boundaries, the editors suggest that the essays can contribute to and stimulate a discussion of the relations between postcolonial and intercultural theories and methodologies (10). The nine essays in the volume are arranged in roughly chronological order. They range from Endre Hárs’s examination of transcultural and transnational discourses as forms of multivocality in Herder’s Adrastea to Gabriele Scherer’s analysis of José F.A. Oliver’s poetry that evokes postcolonial notions of hybridity and a “third place.” Scherer compares Oliver’s work to that of a sculptor who creates “word works of art,” drawing on linguistic, cultural, and discursive elements in Alemannic and Andalusian dialects as well as in standard German and Spanish, in order to explore multiple cultural spaces and modes of experience (190). By reading Oliver’s poetry in the context of his essays in Mein andalusisches Schwarzwalddorf, Scherer reveals transcultural postnational memory as a pivotal dimension of the author’s work (200–201). Eva Blome discusses German colonial discourses in the early twentieth century through a detailed analysis of Robert Müller’s Das Inselmädchen (1919). Blome identifies colonialism’s “excessive” focus on sexuality and sexual contact with “the foreign” as a central aspect of Müller’s work within the context of literary primitivism and the cultural imagination of colonialism, which is problematized through the nexus of “politics and love” (86–88). In her essay “‘Wie ein Indio!’ ‘Whiteness’ und ‘non-whiteness’ in Max Frischs Homo faber” Melanie Rohner uses critical whiteness studies (i.e., the work of Richard Dyer) as a point of departure to discuss the main character’s (Walter Faber) rationality and self-consciousness of “whiteness” as they conflict with his experience of the “irrational” world of “non-whiteness” in Guatemala and Cuba (115). Although Faber remains largely bound to colonialism, Rohner argues that a consciousness of his own mortality and death signal a rupture in identity which ultimately leads to his turn from technology and to an increasing identification with the “Indio” (128–129). Rohner’s reading of Homo faber exemplifies the potential for analyses that reveal the interplay of postcolonial and intercultural discourses. Essays by Iulia-Karin Patrut and Herbert Uerlings examine representations of Sinti and Roma in literary and historical texts, as well as in visual culture, ranging from Patrut’s analyses of European and German discourses related to “gypsies,” Jews, [End Page 229] and Germans in the nineteenth century, to Uerlings discussion of the “Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under the National Socialist Regime” which opened in 2012. Patrut and Uerlings situate representations of Sinti and Roma within the context of discursive constructions of Jews, Roma, Sinti, and Turks and interrogate how they relate to Germany’s projections of (post-)national identities...
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Nov 3, 2021
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