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Browsing by Author "Karlsson, Elisabeth Helena"

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    Towards a multiculturalism for the 21st century : German and Scandinavian literary perspectives, 1990-2005.
    (2008-08) Karlsson, Elisabeth Helena
    This dissertation is a reading of literary texts from 1990-2005 by four authors of immigrant extraction in Germany and Scandinavia. I ask how these authors engage in both a reality of multiculturalism and a discourse of multiculturalism. The project is organized around the tension in these texts between negative experiences of ethnic and global disadvantage and positive representations of minority identity and cultural mixture. I argue that the four writers-Feridun Zaimoglu (Germany), Bertrand Besigye (Norway), Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Sweden) and Emine Sevgi Özdamar (Germany)-combine in their texts a serious critique of the dominant culture with a playful, critical, often provocative outlook on identity. In light of recent theoretical critiques of the terms "multiculturalism" and "minority", I defend the value of minority perspectives and sensibilities to contemporary German and Scandinavian society, identity and culture. I start my discussion with an analysis of the Kanak identities in two of the Turkish-German Feridun Zaimoglu's texts. I discuss how Zaimoglu's appropriation of the derogatory word for foreigner in Germany serves a critique of a dominant German culture reluctant to embrace its new ethnic minorities. Then I analyze the Ugandan-Norwegian Bertrand Besigye's prose poetry. I show how cultural and racial difference can be used playfully to insert difference into a national identity too narrowly and homogenously defined. In Jonas Hassen Khemiri's texts, I discuss how Khemiri criticizes the ethnic definitions assigned to immigrants by the Swedish majority culture and how he pushes for a more open, cosmopolitan national identity. Engaging with the Turkish-German Emine Sevgi Özdamar's texts, lastly, I examine how the author's conciliatory and humorous attitude toward the reality of multiculturalism potentially fosters cross-cultural identification and more open and generous identities. In the end, I show that a multiculturalism worth defending is one that acknowledges persisting ethnic and racial inequalities and prejudices while it at the same time expands the horizons of our cultural, national and individual identities.