Literary Archives and Alternative Futures. Memories of Labor Migration in Contemporary Turkish German Fiction

This chapter analyses fictional engagements with the history and memory of labor migration by way of three novels by contemporary German-language writers of Turkish descent: Fatma Aydemir, Dilek Güngör and Deniz Utlu). Their novels are part of a larger recent cultural “revival and reanimation” (Sun, Foreword: Archival Engagement. TRANSIT 13 (2): i–v, 2022) of the Turkish German archive, which critically complements dominant national narratives of belonging and identity, while also (re-)activating the forgotten possibilities of marginalized historical experiences in an attempt to open up alternative futures. Focusing on a range of prominent themes and tropes that permeate all three novels, this analysis examines the tensions between private and public, as well as marginalized and canonical, archives, alongside exploring different generational memories and positionalities. The chapter investigates how literary memory work intersects with questions of both legal and symbolic (non-)citizenship, arguing that the three novels create literary (counter-)archives that enable mnemonic repair and cultural recognition. As such, they perform artistic “acts of citizenship” (Isin and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship. London and New York: Zed Books, 2008); these have the potential to open alternative, future-oriented possibilities of being in the world and with others, while also empowering new claims to belonging in contemporary, “postmigrant” Germany.