Feridun Zaimoglu was accused of committing acts of plagiarism and symbolic matricide in his novel Leyla (2006). The accusations are groundless. The controversy exposes misconceptions among German critics regarding the nature of literary fiction in general, and literary fiction by ethnic minority or migrant writers in particular. This paper examines the allegations, sets Leyla in the context of some of Zaimoglus other work, and analyses some contested passages in relation to passages in the allegedly plagiarized novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserai (1992) by Emine Sevgi zdamar.

This article argues for the adoption of the term exophony (and its derivative adjective exophonic) as a useful and appropriate description of the phenomenon of writing by nonnative speakers of a language, in this case of German. Exophony avoids the thematic prescriptiveness of older terms used in the German context such as Auslnder- and Migrantenliteratur, and of more recent thematically motivated terminology such as axial and postnational. It allows an important distinction to be drawn between the differing contexts of production of writing by non-native-speakers and native-speakers of hybrid identity, calling attention to the politics of style in non-native-speaker writing. The innovative stylistic features observed in the work of writers such as Franco Biondi, Emine Sevgi zdamar and Yoko Tawada are analogous to the strategies of appropriation identified in certain postcolonial literatures. They defamiliarise the German language in a manner which is often alienating for German readers.

Migranten sind Menschen, die ber die Grenze kommen oder gehen. Migration bedeutet sowohl Aus- als auch Zuwanderung, Zwang und Not auf der einen, Chance und Abenteuerlust auf der anderen Seite. Dementsprechend kann sich ein Migrationsmuseum auf die Geschichte der Zuwanderung oder der Auswanderung konzentrieren, es kann aber auch verschiedene Migrationsbewegungen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart unter einem Dach vereinen und dabei Parallelen oder Unterschiede hervorheben. Die Frage, der in diesem Beitrag nachgegangen werden soll, ist, welche Migrationsbewegungen in Deutschland in den letzten Jahren vor allem erinnert wurden und in welcher Form sie in verschiedenen Ausstellungs- und Museumsprojekten inszeniert wurden.

This essay explores the relationship between the representation of gender, sexuality and ethnicity and the negotiation of urban space in the post-migrant city films of two of the most prominent Turkish-German filmmakers working today, Thomas Arslan and Fatih Akin. It aims to identify whether stereotypical representations of ethnically specific gender relations of the sort to be found in the so-called cinema of duty of the 1970s and 1980s have been abandoned in contemporary filmmaking in favour of more complex and diverse versions of the interaction between male/female identities and ethnicity, or whether, in fact, more recent films produce a new set of stereotypes in this regard. It investigates representations of Turkish-German masculinities and examines the ways in which female identities have been imagined on screen, before turning briefly to representations of gender/sexual dynamics which fall outside the binary logic underpinning all of the films discussed here, exploring the consequences of these for their construction of Turkish-German identities.