Voices from the Borders. Feridun Zaimoglu’s <i>Kanaksprak</i>
10.13125/2039-6597/130
Kanak Sprak, a collection of reportages by the Turkish-German author Feridun Zaimoglu issued in 1995, suggests two considerations: on the one hand on the strategies of empowerment of the stigma &ldquo;Kanake&rdquo;, which labels Turkish and other Germans with migration background who have been raised in the Federal Republic; on the other hand on the distortion of the mainstream language as a strategy of decolonization. Hence, this paper focuses on the subversion of the stereotype and the &ldquo;relexification&rdquo; of the language. The stereotype works &ndash; as Homi Bhabha claims &ndash; like an apparatus, a deployment in which relations of force are formed and operate. By turning the stereotype into an articulation of their difference, Zaimoglu&rsquo;s Kanaken try to subvert the hegemonic gaze, which contains their fluid identity into a label, and thus to assert their &ldquo;in-betweeness&rdquo; as &ldquo;synthetic products&rdquo;. Yet, their strategy of empowerment works as a performance of codes of behaviour and of a body language, which turn to absorb the mainstream gaze, failing in the claim for a resistant identity. Furthermore their corrupted language, which is neither German nor Turkish, but a sort of provocative street slang rich in vernacular terms, works as a &ldquo;relexification&rdquo;, as Chantal Zabus calls the attempt to corrupt an European language with elements from another cultural substrate. Yet, Zaimoglu&rsquo;s rendering of it sounds like a mockery of this slang, as the hegemonic German culture usually encodes it. So, the fluid border crossing of Kanak interstitial identity in the end crystallizes in a mimicry, in which both codes of behaviour and language structures become a metonymic representation of difference.
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2039-6597
130
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Tiziana Urbano
Between
German minor literature
Voci dai margini. La <i>Kanaksprak</i> di Feridun Zaimoglu
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
1
Geocriticism, Geopolitics: The Gaze of the Other
2011-05-23
2011-05-23
2011-04-21
2011-05-23
1
Tiziana Urbano
2011/05/23
10.13125/2039-6597/130
2039-6597
1
German minor literature
it
Voci dai margini. La <i>Kanaksprak</i> di Feridun Zaimoglu
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/130
1
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