Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum. Il romanzo politico di Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Emine Sevgi Özdamar, one of the authors most representative of contemporary German literature, defies the easy cataloging and categorisation which tends to be the fate of an artist such as herself, who observes, perceives and represents, in a personal and original way, our multifaceted and multicultural society. Her work, rich in autobiographical detail, mainly portrays female protagonists against the backdrop of events unfolding in Turkey and Germany, and partly in France. This contribution aims to focus on the game of identities that emerges as the primary theme in her latest novel Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum (Özdamar 2021), the writer's most mature and complex work to date. The identity of the protagonist – actress, theatre assistant and writer – is the result of a particularly profound work of observation of near and distant worlds, of listening, of internalization and of continuous elaboration. The result is a representation of the world both past and present, of Turkish rural reality and that of the great contemporary European metropolis that demolishes the concept of identity, where such an identity is linked to its host nation and is a consequence of political decisions. Özdamar's is a 'minor' literature in the sense of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but this is not to say it is of lesser value. It goes beyond what Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak had to say on the subject in the 1980s. It goes beyond the boundaries of centrality that the West attributes to itself and those of the hierarchy inherent in the 'center-margins' concept. It interprets the overcoming of conventions and beliefs according to which knowledge radiates outwards from the West with the consequent subordination of those civilisations geographically located on the margins or distant from central Europe and the West.