Foreword by the Managing Editor
It is my privilege to present the second issue of the fourteenth volume of TRANSIT Journal, now celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its conceptualization by founding members, Deniz Göktürk and Anton Kaes, of the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of German. The first issue grew out of an international conference titled “Goodbye, Germany? Migration, Culture, […]
CfP 14.1 Automated Precarity
CFP TRANSIT Journal: Volume 14.1 2022-2023: Automated Precarity In light of ongoing adversities facing migrant communities – climate disasters that displace millions, the automation of production, and political systems that precipitate flight – we invite projects and papers that engage with precarity in its material, social, and aesthetic forms. No longer seen as anomalies but rather […]
Foreword: Archival Engagement
Dear Readers, It is my privilege to present the second issue of the thirteenth volume of TRANSIT on Archival Engagement. This theme is inspired by an ongoing series titled “Archives of Migration: The Power of Fiction in Times of Fake News,” which began at UC Berkeley and UC Davis in spring 2021 in the midst […]
Escaping the Hamster Wheel: Creative Remembrance in Traveling Archives
TRANSIT vol. 13, no. 2 Deniz Göktürk Download PDF Abstract How can one find meaning in the scattered fragments that remain from a life? For me, this question arose full force when I was asked to contribute a short piece of writing on my mother Angela Göktürk to a volume honoring her life and work, […]
BOOK REVIEW: DisOrientations
by Kristin DickinsonTRANSIT vol. 13, no. 2 Download PDF Dickinson, Kristen. DisOrientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation, 1811-1946. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2021. 257 pages. In a work that parses the literary, philosophical and political reflections of a varied cast of writers, Kristin Dickinson prompts us to consider how Orientalist methods were shaped in part by […]
Archival Dispersals: Literary Magazines as Mobile and Fragmentary Archives
TRANSIT vol. 13, no. 2 Mert Bahadır Reisoğlu Download PDF Abstract This article reconceptualizes the fragmentary status of the archive of migration by focusing on Turkish German literary magazines Ezgi, Parantez, Şiir-lik and Allıturna. In the first part, I argue that literary magazines as intrinsically diasporic, mobile and spatially dispersed media provide us with a […]
The Digital Archive of Diaspora: Blogging (Post)Migration
TRANSIT vol. 13, no. 2 Linda Maeding Download PDF Abstract Transnational diaspora groups make intensive use of community media when communicating and connecting in cyberspace. In particular, I argue that blogs constitute a new kind of (post)migrant archive that compiles shared histories and experiences of diaspora. The principal role of the digital archive has become […]
Memory Meetings: Semra Ertan’s Ausländer and the Practice of the Migrant Archive
TRANSIT vol. 13, no. 2 Sultan Doughan Download PDF Abstract Turkish migration to Germany has long been debated as not having been sufficiently documented and given an adequate place in German national archives. But these debates have often reified a static and nationally organized logic of the archive. This essay instead traces the literary figure […]
Counterarchives, Appropriation and the Disobedient Gaze: Archival Structures in Ursula Biemann’s Contained Mobility and Charles Heller’s Lorenzo Pezzani’s Death by Rescue
TRANSIT vol. 13, no. 2 Anna-Maria Senuysal Download PDF Abstract In the past twenty years, an abundance of video works has emerged that engages with the global crisis of forced migration, many of which employ a critical documentary approach in their negotiation and exploration of these issues. Two such works, which are the primary objects […]
“Almanya: A [Different] Future is Possible” Defying Narratives of Return in Fatma Aydemir’s Ellbogen
TRANSIT vol. 13, no. 2 Jon Cho-Polizzi Download PDF Abstract This paper investigates the theme of returning ‘home’ in Fatma Aydemir’s 2017 novel, Ellbogen, arguing that the novel’s protagonist utilizes her physical journey to Turkey to formulate a new, fluid positionality between apparently conflicting expressions of Otherness and belonging. Through the lens of decolonial anthropology, […]