Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture - Postmigration: Aesthetics and Interventions, Apr 2023

This article examines Yamina Benguigui’s 2001 film Inch’Allah Dimanche as a reflection of the transformative impact of past and ongoing migrations to France. While the narrative centres on an Algerian family reunification in the north of France during the 1970s, the film incorporates numerous landscapes as active aesthetic and narrative devices that, I argue, could be studied through a postmigratory lens. In an ecological reading that attends to the multiple discursive, historical and thematic threads embedded in the film’s physical environment, I analyse three landscapes featured as metaphors for the sets of struggles, conflicts and negotiations taking place in societies shaped by migration and colonialism. By taking such an approach, I aim to foreground the ecological dimensions of postmigration and their potential to further decentre the study of audio-visual narratives about migration.

Tempelhofer Feld, in Berlin, Germany, is a large urban park located in the south of the city. Returned to the residents as a public green area in the early 2000s, the park has since become increasingly popular. Plans for a development of the area (including turning part of the area into a residential compound) have been consistently met with strong opposition. This paper looks at how regular users (with a background of migration) engage with the park, across a variety of activities and social constellations. Even though, to a casual observer, the park doesn’t seem to offer much more than a flat sequence of grassy lawns and asphalt lanes, there is, among regulars, a strong consensus on the beauty of the place. It’s an experiential (as opposed to contemplative) beauty, that enhances people’s sense of emplacement, of being present in space, as well as their affective entanglement with it. Through their relationship with the park, and among themselves, the research participants reorient themselves as Berlin residents, negotiating and reconfiguring the often narrow confines of their situation as migrants.

I will relocate Zafer Şenocak’s work within the aesthetics of postmigration. His novel Perilous Kinship (Gefährliche Verwandtschaft 1998) can be regarded as an important attempt to challenge and change the political core narrative of Germany as a homogeneous society during reunification times. By contributing to the political and public discourses of national belonging, integration policies and immigration politics from the late 1990s onward, the novel’s fragmented, open-ended story can be seen as a distinct example for a narrative of postmigratory belonging that goes beyond territorial, ethnically essentialized and otherwise fixated constructions of cultural identities, including postcolonial and hybrid identity constructions. The novel, by style and structure, can be analysed through the lens of a transformative aesthetics that makes the visible invisible (and vice versa), undoes marginalization and in so doing demonstrates the construction of identity and society as plural and performative. It further challenges the perception of Berlin as a site of coherent national history by describing it as ‘The capital of the fragment’ and as ‘a city of immigration par excellence’. My argument is that the protagonist’s multi-layered cultural identity construction as someone, who discovers his Jewish-German-Turkish family connections, draws parallels to the conceptualization of Berlin as a super-diverse metropolitan space.

In the last decade, the concept of radical diversity has gained traction, not least in the circles around the postmigrant theatre at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin. This essay explores this concept and interprets it as part of the overall tendency in postmigratory art and culture to move beyond clear-cut identity groups and to build alliances and coalitions beyond stable identity markers. Radical diversity thus not only denounces doctrines of cultural homogeneity and monoculturalism but also rejects the logic of integration and traditional ideas of multiculturalism. Against this background, radical diversity focuses on the multiplicity of subject positions in society, as well as on the complexity of structures of discrimination and marginalization. As a artistic-political intervention, this essay argues, radical diversity expresses some of the major characteristics of postmigrant societies and urges us to reconsider traditional research perspectives on migratory art and on the relation between culture and migration.

My article, from the perspective of critical Europeanization studies, argues to consider a postmigratory approach for revisiting not only the ‘nation’ but also ‘Europe’ – as being similarly constituted by long-term colonial and postcolonial migration movements, as well as by Afropean entanglements across a Black Mediterranean. Therefore, migrancy is not only the product but also the producer of a shifting figuration called Europe. Hence, as much as that of the nation, the concept of and the perspective on Europe needs to be ‘migrantized’.

Şeyda Kurt already realized in her childhood: the streets belong to us. Last year, she has published the bestseller Radikale Zärtlichkeit: Warum Liebe politisch ist (‘Radical tenderness: Why love is political’) (2021) and graciously granted me an interview about what moves her as a journalist. The conversation took place in Café Südblock (‘Café South Block’) at Berlin’s Kotti (Kottbusser Tor in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district). That day the background noise was particularly high, even without music. Basically, it was not the best place for recording an interview but was in a way suitable for capturing the urban flair. Café Südblock provided us with the space to talk about labour migration, class issues and Radical Tenderness. In the following summary of the interview, Kurt answers the question about how tenderness and living together in the world are interwoven and how this can be related to her own biography.