VON DER ‘MACHT, WELT ZU MACHEN’: RADIKALE DEMOKRATIE IN SHARON DODUA OTOOS ADAS RAUM*

Abstract

Drawing on Jacques Rancièreʼs radical democratic concept of dissensus, my article centres on the epistemic, affective and verbal forms of resistance depicted in Sharon Dodua Otooʼs debut novel Adas Raum. In four diegetic narrative strands, a police order of the visible and the sayable damages and assimilates the characters’ lives. According to Jamika Ajalon, stories are lost in colonised space, but at the same time self-determined stories have been shared generation after generation in order to stay alive. The everyday of Ada, but also of supposedly minor characters, such as the survivors of the Irish famine Lizzie and Alfie, is not only the site of violent Othering. Interconnected through different historical eras, the characters imagine other worlds at the margins. They develop creative counter-strategies and safer spaces which can be understood, with Davina Cooper, as everyday utopias. I will show that the dissensual tension between experiencing the world as it is and the search for a better future can be seen as a central leitmotif of the novel. By giving back agency to marginalised subjects in narratives of resistance, Otoo's novel can be seen as an aesthetic artefact that brings to life world-making, dissensual images which political activists can appropriate in their fight for equality and freedom.