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Akçam – Zaimoğlu –‘Kanak Attak’: Turkish Lives and Letters in German[Note 1. This essay is based on research funded by the ...]
Author(s) -
Cheesman Tom
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0483.00223
Subject(s) - german , turkish , narrative , exoticism , realism , multiculturalism , newspaper , reading (process) , phenomenon , literature , white (mutation) , history , art , sociology , media studies , philosophy , political science , law , linguistics , pedagogy , archaeology , epistemology , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
In the later 1990s the writer Feridun Zaimoğlu (b. 1963) seized the label ‘Kanak’ to create himself as a spokesman for Turkish and other visibly non‐German Germans who have been raised in the Federal Republic but have outsider status. In three books based on interviews with young male and female ‘Kanaken’ and ‘Kanakas’, melding documentary realism, subcultural theory and dramatic prose poetry, and in polemical essays and narrative sketches composed in the same stylised ‘Kanak Sprak’, Zaimoğlu savaged institutionalised German racism, and attacked the hypocrisies of multicultural policy, the patronising exoticism practised by promoters of ‘Migrantenliteratur’, and the conformism of Turkish‐German politicians and writers of ‘Gastarbeiterliteratur’. Zaimoğlu's non‐stop reading tour, talk‐show appearances, newspaper and magazine features, productions of his work for the stage, and a film, Kanak Attack! ,based on one of his books, were key ingredients in the late‐90s phenomenon of ‘Kanak‐Chic’: the media's ‘discovery’ of bright, young, non‐white, hybrid Germans. This phenomenon, which Zaimoğlu at once personified, profited from and criticised, is analysed in the present article.