Hybridity in Culture, Literature and Language: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Caribbean Canadian and Turkish German Women's Writing Exemplified by the Writers M. N. Philip and E. S. Ozdamar

Abstract

The politics of writing of the Caribbean Canadian writer Marlene Nourbese Philip and the Turkish German writer Emine Sevgi Ozdamar show a crucial concern for the development of serious multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multilingual dialogue, a concern which will also be the focus of this thesis. The specific contribution this study of the two writers will provide to the field of ethnic minority and non-White women's writing in Canada and Germany consists of its comparative-interdisciplinary approach. Critical texts on the writings of Philip and Ozdamar or on cultural, literary and lingual hybridity are numerous, ' especially in the areas of minority discourse, post-colonialism and feminism. However, linkages of these three components are very rare. A major emphasis of this work is to reveal the significant similarities -an approach still carefully attending to the context-specific cultural and individual differences-that exist in Philip's and Ozdamar's writings and writerly positions and hence to motivate an intensification of comparative work and co-operation between the disciplines of Canadian and German literature. The introductory chapter clarifies and explains the choice of literary theory and tern1inology that builds the framework for the comparison done here. This involves a critical discussion of the concepts of cultural, literary, and lingual hybridity as well as the workings of permanent and intermittent, imposed and self-chosen salience in the process of identification. Chapter two compares Ozdamar's and Philip's writings in relation to the women's historical, social, political, and legal positions in the German and Canadian models of the nationstate and immigration. Building on this context, chapter three then discusses their public and critical-academic reception in Germany and Canada, their exclusionary position within mainstream literature, and their politics of resistance as "excentric" German and Canadian writers. Chapter four is most text-related as it specifically relates to the writers' intersecting strategies of lingual hybridity, embodied language and body-memory in Mutterzunge and She Tries Her Tongue. The conclusion re-evaluates the writers' "ex-centric" and yet integral positions at the border of single-nation literary studies, positions from which Ozdamar and Philip relocate literary, lingual, and cultural belonging in the German and Canadian nation-state respectively.