Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “A Charwoman’s Career Memories of Germany”: Prosthetic Imagination and Masquerade

Yalcin, G. (2023) Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “A Charwoman’s Career Memories of Germany”: Prosthetic Imagination and Masquerade. In: AHM Conference 2023: 'Diasporic Heritage and Identity', Amsterdam, Netherlands, 21-23 June 2023, pp. 99-108. ISBN 9789048562220 (doi: 10.5117/978904856222/AHM.2023.011)

Abstract

This paper explores Turkish-German diasporic memory formations performed within the intersections of a politics of remembrance, issues of ethnicised migration and a sexual politics. Situated within a performance studies context, it analyses Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s short story “A Charwoman’s Career Memories of Germany” which follows the perspective of a Turkish woman who migrates into Germany as a guest worker. The narrator’s engagement with a German history is read as the workings of a “prosthetic imagination,” which she uses as a creative tool to implicate her experience of migration in culturally mediated forms of remembrance and world- making. Özdamar’s narrator masquerades as the corpse of Ophelia to gain access to a cultural and historical field of representations and uses this insider position to question from within the very discourses that perpetuate objectifying and alienating views of Gastarbeiter (guest worker) women.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Keywords: Diasporic memory, masquerade, migrant labour, remembrance, sexual politics
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Yalcin, Gonca
• Authors: Yalcin, G.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Theatre Film and TV Studies
• Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
• ISBN: 9789048562220
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the AHM Conference 2023: 'Diasporic Heritage and Identity', pp 99-108
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License

Related URLs

• Organisation