Migration, Forced Displacement, and Aesthetic Agency: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum

Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum (Ada’s Room, 2021) complexly explores the significance as well as limits of the paradigm of migration for the project of remembering and reimagining Afrodiasporic histories and experiences. With reference to the colonial period, National Socialism, and the twenty-first century, the novel interweaves a range of histories of voluntary and forced displacement on different inner-African, African-European, and inner-European routes. Beyond mapping such complexity of movement and identity from a primarily sociohistorical angle, Adas Raum also reflects on the affordances of literature in remembering and reimagining experiences of displacement. The chapter foregrounds the novel’s intricate act of narration and discourse on agency via the figure of the main narrator, a non- (or not yet-)human agent who materializes as different objects in the novel’s four main historical scenarios: a broom in 1459, a door knocker in 1848, a concentration camp room in 1945, and a passport in 2019. Partly by way of humorously serious dialogue with a less than fully authoritative monotheistic God, the narrator’s reflections on their role across these scenarios unfold an extended meditation on the agency in aesthetic mediation that imaginatively resonates with contemporary Black radical theory, new materialisms, and Actor-Network Theory.