“(West)Berliner Zeitlichkeiten und das Archiv der Migration: Aras Ören und Deniz Utlu,” Ela Gezen

Sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies.

In his poetics, Aras Ören explicitly addresses the impact of Turkish immigration on West Berlin and its literary manifestation. Identifying himself as a kind of literary archivist, Ören indicates his work’s evocation of multiple and changing temporalities and highlights his role in shaping them. His poetics, as Gezen will show, is thus marked by a dynamic relationship not only between him (the writer) and his surroundings (West Berlin), but also between various temporalities across his oeuvre, continuously establishing connections between Turkish and German contexts. Professor Gezen will further explores Ören’s oeuvre’s significance within postmigrant frameworks, specifically in the context of Deniz Utlu’s work, to understand continuities and ruptures in the formulation of an archive of migration.

Ela Gezen is an Associate Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her first book Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960 (Camden House, 2018), studies the significance of Bertolt Brecht for Turkish and Turkish German literature. Currently, she is working on her second book project, Cultures in Migration: Turkish Artistic Practices and Cultural-Political Interventions in West Berlin, which examines cultural practices by Turkish artists, academics, and intellectuals during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a key part of the formation of a Turkish public sphere in West Berlin. She is the co-editor of two special journal issues exploring new directions in the field of Turkish German Studies, of one book on minority discourses in Germany, and editor of a special issue on Aras Ören. In addition, she has published articles on music, theater and literature, focusing on the intersection between aesthetics and politics in both Turkish and German contexts.

This will be a virtual lecture held in German.

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