GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

This article explores Sharon Dodua Otoo's historical and memory activism and demonstrates how she challenges epistemic injustices inflicted by dominant models of cultural memory and identity in Germany, particularly in relation to its colonial history. Such epistemic injustice takes two main forms – the ongoing subjugation of subaltern (hi)stories and the under-acknowledgement of grassroots diasporic activism – resulting in multiple levels of marginalisation and sustaining what the philosopher Charles Mills calls ‘the white epistemology of ignorance’. Building on Sarah Colvin's studies of epistemic resistance in Otoo's literary prose, I argue that Otoo's historical and memory activism is an example of what José Medina refers to as ‘epistemic insurrection’. Otoo's self-consciously collaborative interventions in historical and memory politics facilitate the kind of ‘beneficial epistemic friction’ expounded by Medina, which is necessary to prevent dominant forces from co-opting insurgent counter-histories and counter-memories. Otoo invokes a community of activist experts and poets, past and present, whose collective knowledge production offers alternative ways of thinking about history and opportunities to subvert the power dynamics of cultural memory. Her activism reaches across diverse genres, media and public domains, and engages multiperspectivity to contribute to more pluralistic modes of doing history and memory.

In this article I argue that in recent novels by Sharon Dodua Otoo and Olivia Wenzel the trope of motherhood is engaged to evoke an emancipatory impulse that is paradoxically linked to acknowledging constraint or connectedness. Motherhood is an idea burdened by historical stereotypes, and I argue that Otoo and Wenzel use aesthetic means to subvert gendered and racialising mythologies and controlling assumptions about who can provide nurturing, reinscribing motherhood in ways that depart from Western expectations of an idealised one-on-one relation. Building on Michelle Wright's analysis of Black motherhood as a poetic trope of subversive agency, Theresa Washington's exploration of the West African concept of Ájè in African American women's writing, and Francine Wynn's conception of the chiastic mother-infant relation, I suggest that Otoo and Wenzel show how the trope of motherhood can not only be subversive but (perhaps appropriately) epistemically generative. It can be read as a foundational image for a different epistemological discourse that does not depend on the mastery of difference.

Charlie, the main character in Sharon Dodua Otoo's Afrofuturist Christmas novella Synchronicity, is a Black single mother of Ghanaian heritage working as a graphic designer in Berlin who has spent her whole life feeling the constraints of her ancestral traditions. When one day she starts losing her ability to see colours, she cannot disclose that family-specific dis/ability since it would have professional and material consequences. Charlie embarks on a journey of self-reflection, in the course of which she will realise that something that at first seemed to be a loss could, in fact, be a blessing in disguise. My essay analyses the intersection of Blackness and dis/ability in Synchronicity through the lens of DisCrit: a theoretical approach associating Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory, and argues that Otoo's novella manages to effectively depict the intersections regarding the onset of an invisible dis/abilty as well as Blackness and diasporic experiences, while an Afrofuturist reading of the novella allows us to consider it as a story based on hope, self-acceptance and the need for community.

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<