INTRODUCTION: SHARON DODUA OTOO – LITERATURE, POLITICS, POSSIBILITY

Abstract

Sharon Dodua Otoo is one of the most visible and influential writers currently working in Germany. She was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 and the Medal of Merit of the city-state of Berlin (Verdienstorden des Landes Berlin) in 2022.

Otoo came to prominence in the German-speaking world with her Bachmann-prizewinning short story ‘Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin’, which has since been published in the original German alongside English translations and recently in a new German-language edition.1 Two novellas –The Things I am Thinking While Smiling Politely and Synchronicity – had appeared prior to that, both in Otoo's original English and in German translations by Mirjam Nuenning.2 Her first full-length novel, Adas Raum, appeared in the original German with S. Fischer in 2021. The novel was shortlisted for the Das Debut prize in 2021 and was one of NDR-Kultur's best books of 2021.3 A Dutch-language translation appeared in 2022 and Japanese and English-language translations (as Ada's Room in North America and Ada's Realm in the UK) in 2023. Otoo's international profile as a writer is reflected in residencies and honours outside Germany: she is a Visiting Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and she was the Schröder Writer-in-Residence at the University of Cambridge in 2022 and the Max Kade Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania in 2023.

Like the literary predecessor she admires, Toni Morrison,4 Otoo is a politically engaged writer with an academic background in the literature she contributes to (Morrison took a degree in English Literature, Otoo in German). She has spoken about and published numerous essays on the issues faced by Black writers and artists in contemporary Germany, and makes regular interventions through print, broadcast and social media in public discussions on feminism, class, colonialism and identity. She has served on the board of the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) and is affiliated with the Black queer-feminist organisation ADEFRA; both associations have been at the forefront of the Afro-German movement since the mid-1980s.5 In this context, Otoo draws on and extends the legacy of the pioneering Afro-German poet-activist May Ayim, another literary predecessor whom Otoo regularly cites as a key influence and role model.

When in 2022 she was awarded the Berlin medal, the press release from the Mayor's office pointed explicitly to both her artistic and her political interventions: ‘Sharon Dodua Otoo erhält den Verdienstorden des Landes Berlin in Anerkennung und Würdigung hervorragender Verdienste durch ihre künstlerischen und politischen Interventionen in Berlin und darüberhinaus.’6 That partnering of life and letters, art and politics seems key to an understanding of Otoo's work and is a recurrent theme in this special issue of German Life and Letters as the first-ever dedicated volume to address Otoo's oeuvre. The articles have been developed from papers delivered at the international colloquium focused on Otoo's work that was held at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 2022.

Otoo has regularly expressed her awareness of the advantages as a political activist that her prominence as a prizewinning literary writer has brought her. The success of ‘Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin’ and, more recently, of Adas Raum has facilitated her access to mainstream and high-profile spaces within the German literary, cultural and political establishment. Shortly after she won the Bachmann Prize in 2016, for example, she was invited to speak at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, at the opening of a major exhibition on German colonialism; the event offered her an opportunity to underscore her self-understanding as a literary and political activist.7 In particular, she used the platform to express solidarity with the ongoing demands for restorative justice being made by descendants of Herero and Nama victims of the genocide committed under colonial rule in German-Southwest Africa (today's Namibia).

She is now recognised in Germany as an important voice in public discussions about governmental and societal cultural politics surrounding the restitution of stolen art and artefacts from former European colonies – a subject which is also thematised in Adas Raum in the motif of the gold bracelet. In November 2021, she was one of four experts to take part in an online panel entitled ‘Restitution – Absolution? Die Benin Bronzen und das koloniale Erbe’. Organised by the University of Hamburg and sponsored by the Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung, the event featured Otoo alongside the historian Jürgen Zimmerer, the art historian and restitution expert Bénédicte Savoy, and the (then) director of the cultural department of the German Auswärtiges Amt, Andreas Görgen.8 She was invited to join a delegation accompanying the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) on his tour of Senegal, Niger and South Africa in May 2022.9

Otoo is not, of course, the first German-language literary writer whose prominence as an artist has enabled her political engagement: Günter Grass actively supported the SPD's election campaign in 1965, Heinrich Böll publicly defended Ulrike Meinhof in the face of media hatred in 1972,10 and Elfriede Jelinek has been vocal in her opposition to Jörg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria as well as producing fierce critiques of gender and social power. There are, then, apparent synergies between literature and politics. Indeed, the most memorable works of art, argue Izabella Penier and Anna Suwalska-Kolecka in their study of Art, Ethics, and Provocation (2016), are ‘remembered for their subversive power that shook us out of our complacency […] they have endowed us with a new outlook on the world and defied established social norms’.11 Anthony Reed in his analysis of experimental poetics, Freedom Time (2014), describes a literary politics that is rooted in ‘opening new horizons of thinking by calling into question the grounds of knowledge’; poetic writing, he argued, is ‘writing that thinks differently’.12 In Reed's argument, literary politics reside not least in literary poetics: in ‘the “aesthetic break” where consensus slips away and new thinking breaks through’.13 Paula Moya, too, in her pathbreaking rethink of literary criticism, The Social Imperative (2016), reads literature as profoundly political. ‘If literature were not fundamentally ideological’, she asserts, ‘if it were not so revealing of the complex ways in which our diverse cultural ideas inform and motivate our equally diverse practices and behaviors – there would be little reason to retain literature as a field of study in the academy’.14

This is at odds with an established assumption that art and activism should be separate because the latter somehow diminishes the former. Politics is regularly described as a dirty practice, where art is supposed to be beautiful: Colm Tóibín has written of poetry's ‘beautiful neutrality’.15 Otoo points out that neutrality is itself a political position16 that reflects a will not to disturb the surface (or sometimes the essence) of the status quo. Yet passive or active support for political continuity rather than political change is regularly mistaken for an absence of politics, most particularly in matters of social justice: ‘identity politics’, for example, are widely but mistakenly assumed to be practised exclusively by people seeking to highlight structural inequalities and to effect change in how difference is handled, and not by people whose interest is in maintaining a status quo that privileges their own identities in the name of a fictional universality.17 In the shrill discourse that has surrounded ‘identity politics’ in recent years, the notions of ‘identity’ and ‘politics’ – whether used separately or together – have become tools for delegitimising and discrediting the cultural production of marginalised groups. Ironically those are the very groups for whom the term ‘identity politics’ was in fact originally coined (in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective) as a means of empowerment and coalition-building.18 In her response on social media to the reactions of some (white male) feuilletonists to the fiction shortlist for the 2022 German Book Prize, which included more minoritised writers than had been the case in previous years, the white German writer and critic Nicole Seifert highlighted how, in the German literary sphere, identity politics have been weaponised as something deemed to be particularist, and as the Other of values assumed to be neutral and universal: ‘Wann werdet ihr verstehen, dass es nicht nur Identitätspolitik ist, wenn die anderen ihre Lebensumstände ausloten? Dass es sich auch bei euren Texten seit Ewigkeiten schon um Identitätspolitik handelt?’19 ‘Befindlichkeiten sind immer nur die Befindlichkeiten der andern’,20 tweeted Seifert on the platform then known as ‘Twitter’: ‘Identität ist immer nur die Identität der andern’,21 and ‘“Politische Literatur” ist immer nur die Literatur der andern’.22

The Tweet speaks to a more extensive debate around the problem that the work of Black writers and writers of colour is differently categorised. Socially critical writing that appears to carry elements of fictionalised autobiography has tended to be received differently when the author is Black or of Colour than when the author is white. White writers are generally not reduced to a social identity as white, and a fictional text with autobiographical elements will tend to be read as a sophisticated literary exercise in the mode of autofiction. Texts by Black writers and writers of Colour, by contrast, tend to be read as if they lacked the kind of ‘literary’ filters that distinguish autofiction, ergo as primarily autobiographical accounts even when they have little direct relationship with the author's personal experiences. Responding to Otoo's Tweet, both Sanyal and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah – whose novel Ministerium der Träume appeared in the same batch of spring publications as Adas Raum and Identitti – reported that they were asked repeatedly about perceived autobiographical aspects of their novels and felt compelled to explain that minoritised characters are not necessarily identical to their authors.28 This kind of reading reflects social prejudices and avoids acknowledging the aesthetic qualities and complexities of the texts. The sociopolitical critique expressed in literary writing by white writers and Black writers or writers of Colour is also judged differently, where the critique voiced by white writers is regularly celebrated by reviewers as universally relevant Gesellschaftskritik, but socially critical fiction by minoritised writers is often read reductively, as a ‘mere’ reflection of their minoritised experience and therefore not broadly relevant to society. Otoo's semi-humorous reference to those who are perceived as ‘mostly betroffen’ references the Literatur der Betroffenheit that has long been associated with the writing of minoritised groups in Germany (including the so-called Gastarbeiterliteratur).29 The double standards that mainstream reception applies has the effect of diverting attention away from the need to increase the representation of minoritised groups in the literary field. At the same time, it underscores why better representation is urgently needed as a matter of social and epistemic justice, and how ‘identity politics’ in the sense of collaborative empowerment (based on the intersectional feminism of the Combahee Collective) might even have a generative role to play in the literary sphere. For Otoo, and many other contemporary German-language writers, ‘identity politics’ and Gesellschaftskritik are inseparable – indeed, the latter is incomplete without the former.

Otoo tweeted this in response to a public discussion that unfolded under the hashtag #AllzuWeiss, following the publication of an open letter signed by writers, academics, journalists and readers criticising the all-white fiction shortlist for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in April 2021.34 But her interventions have extended beyond the digital and discursive and begun to bring about concrete change in the literary sphere: in 2022, Otoo curated ‘Resonanzen: Schwarzes Literaturfestival’ as part of the annual Ruhrfestspiele held in the West German town of Recklinghausen. The festival showcased original writing by six Black authors, whose texts were critically discussed by an all-Black jury of experts. It celebrated the aesthetic breadth and diversity of Black German literature, past and present.35 Following the success of the first Resonanzen festival, a second was held in 2023, co-curated by Otoo and the writer Patricia Eckermann under the banner ‘Schwarze Literatur und Lesarten’.36

The essays in this Special Number collectively and interactively examine the synergy of politics and aesthetics in Otoo's literary and cultural production. Tara Talwar Windsor opens the collection by exploring Otoo's historical and memory activism as a form of what José Medina calls ‘epistemic insurrection’, in which Otoo invokes the collective knowledge production of a community of activist experts and poets to challenge epistemic injustices inflicted by dominant models of cultural memory and identity in Germany. The next essays develop that thinking as they offer complementary approaches to Otoo's novella of 2014–15, Synchronicity. First, joseph kebe-nguema analyses the intersection of Blackness and dis/ability in Synchronicity through the lens of DisCrit, mobilising the synergies of Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory. Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva's notion of Black Feminist ‘poethics’, Stephanie Galasso then explores how the title concept ‘synchronicity’ exposes the significance of temporality and causality for racial constructions of the subject. Sarah Colvin's essay addresses Synchronicity alongside Otoo's recent novel, Adas Raum (2021) and Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst (2020); Colvin builds on Michelle Wright's analysis of Black motherhood as a poetic trope and Theresa Washington's exploration of the West African concept of Ájè to suggest that motherhood can be read as a foundational image for an epistemology that does not depend on the mastery of difference. The last group of essays then develop the focus on Adas Raum. Kyung-Ho Cha traces how Ghanaian wisdom poetry is translated into German prose and how cosmological myths, oral proverbs and pictorial symbols from Ghanaian folk thought and religion are adapted in the novel, focusing on the Akan notion of the transmigration of the soul and the Sankofa symbol as representative of an interactive perspective on history. Cha's reading of Adas Raum as a post-postmodern historical novel which intertwines an ethics of care and an ethics of remembering revisits Windsor's opening essay; the novel can also be seen as a literary expression and development of Otoo's historical and memory activism in the public domain. Cha's observations on the novel's multilinguality also chime with Áine McMurtry's essay that follows, where McMurtry draws on Yasemin Yildiz's thinking and explores the critical multilingualism that foregrounds diasporic female figures as material agents, rejecting heteropatriarchal models to explore intersubjective encounters and shared spaces. Like Colvin, McMurtry observes Otoo's structural concern with motherhood and analyses it in the context of gender, racial and class discrimination. Alrik Daldrup's essay is in conversation with both Cha's and McMurtry's in its focus on language in the novel: beginning with Jacques Rancière's radical democratic concept of dissensus, his essay focuses on the epistemic, affective and verbal forms of resistance in Adas Raum, but also on safer spaces, understood with Davina Cooper as everyday utopias. Jon Cho-Polizzi, the translator of the English-language editions of Otoo's novel, concludes the volume with an examination of the theoretical and practical questions involved in the translation process. Cho-Polizzi asks how questions of identity, positionality and voice can be negotiated in a work whose narrative so intricately intertwines those dimensions, and how the literary inheritance which informs a source text might influence its translation into the target language. Translation as an ongoing process, he argues, represents a renegotiation of the source.

The essays collected here testify and contribute variously and collectively to the expansion in theoretical and methodological approaches that is characteristic of a new German Studies which has emerged over recent years (and continues to evolve).37 The contributors to this Special Number both engage with and try to move beyond the more familiarly Eurocentric Anglo-American models of thought in an attempt to do justice to Otoo's writing and thinking, which creatively engages both European and West African knowledge to produce (as the essays collected here demonstrate) epistemological and aesthetic innovation. Sander L. Gilman, in his very recent critical exploration of the twenty-first-century meme that the ‘humanities suck because they are useless’, draws on the post-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger to position fiction as the crucially important space of ‘what-if?’ – that is, the space of thought experiments.38 Otoo has herself described her literary texts as thought experiments. Collectively, these essays can be seen to suggest that the stimulus for thought that literary writing offers means that it may be both that (a single thought experiment) and also more than that: a stimulus and model for ongoing thought experimentation. Literature is a reminder that something else is always possible.