De-essentializing ethnic identities through narrating a plural belonging: Aesthetics of postmigration in Zafer Şenocak’s novel Perilous Kinship (1998)

Abstract

I will relocate Zafer Şenocak’s work within the aesthetics of postmigration. His novel Perilous Kinship (Gefährliche Verwandtschaft 1998) can be regarded as an important attempt to challenge and change the political core narrative of Germany as a homogeneous society during reunification times. By contributing to the political and public discourses of national belonging, integration policies and immigration politics from the late 1990s onward, the novel’s fragmented, open-ended story can be seen as a distinct example for a narrative of postmigratory belonging that goes beyond territorial, ethnically essentialized and otherwise fixated constructions of cultural identities, including postcolonial and hybrid identity constructions. The novel, by style and structure, can be analysed through the lens of a transformative aesthetics that makes the visible invisible (and vice versa), undoes marginalization and in so doing demonstrates the construction of identity and society as plural and performative. It further challenges the perception of Berlin as a site of coherent national history by describing it as ‘The capital of the fragment’ and as ‘a city of immigration par excellence’. My argument is that the protagonist’s multi-layered cultural identity construction as someone, who discovers his Jewish-German-Turkish family connections, draws parallels to the conceptualization of Berlin as a super-diverse metropolitan space.