Books by Joseph Twist
At a time when the place of Muslims in German society is being disputed, this book explores how f... more At a time when the place of Muslims in German society is being disputed, this book explores how four contemporary German writers of Muslim backgrounds - Zafer Senocak, SAID, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Navid Kermani - point beyond identity politics and suggest new ways of thinking about religion and community. Twist highlights both the spirituality and the cosmopolitanism of these authors, bringing their thought into dialogue with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.
Nancy is critical of communities based on a single guiding principle (be it God or Reason) and thus involving a universalizing core that leads to conflicts between identity groups. He proposes alternative notions of both religious faith (a postmonotheistic version with elements of mysticism) and community (spontaneous communities requiring no shared identity). Twist relates these arguments to post-9/11 debates over cosmopolitanism and religion, illuminating how the writers under study draw upon mystical Islam's deconstructive potential, finding divine insight in love, sex, music, pain, and beauty. Such a worldly and affective spirituality dispels associations between Islam and sexual conservatism while rejecting monotheistic ideology. Thus, unlike the homogenizing drive of universalist cosmopolitanism, these writers' nonfoundational conceptualizations undermine the twenty-first century's "clash-of-civilizations" narrative and open up space for new ways of coexisting.
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Articles by Joseph Twist
Oxford German Studies, 2020
The perennial question “was ist deutsch?” resounds throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. This q... more The perennial question “was ist deutsch?” resounds throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. This question is asked again and again since, as the scholar Fatima El-Tayeb outlines, German identity during this period depends on a recurring pattern of “sich regelmäßig wiederholenden, krisenhaften Auseinandersetzungen mit einem ‘Fremdem’” (the “guest worker” question, the Muslim question, the refugee question, etc.) necessitated by a widespread amnesia vis-à-vis the heterogeneity of the German past.1 Thus the question “was ist deutsch?” often becomes a matter of “wer ist deutsch und wer nicht?”. Philosophy and literature play an important role in challenging canonical conceptualizations of Germanness and allowing us to imagine new forms of community. This special edition of Oxford German Studies brings together scholars working in this field, creating a dialogue about conceptualizations of community and subjectivity between philosophy and the arts, including avant-garde literature, science fiction and live performance.
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Oxford German Studies, 2020
Navid Kermani’s novel Dein Name (2011) involves the narrator’s attempt to record in writing every... more Navid Kermani’s novel Dein Name (2011) involves the narrator’s attempt to record in writing everything that happens to him from a certain date, be it thinking about literature, doing household chores, travelling abroad as a reporter, or honouring the deaths of acquaintances. As a whole, this giant novel conveys a multifaceted sense of subjectivity so fundamentally determined by its relationality that it must remain ungraspable. However, Kermani does not merely suggest a world of incommensurable differences, atomisation and alienation, even from ourselves; he also explores forms of openness to difference beyond hierarchical ideas of tolerance and integration. In this regard, the central role that others play in the formation of the narrator’s subjectivity and how this is marked by a series of obituaries leads to the radical re-evaluation of the lives that are deemed to be grievable. The relational understanding of subjectivity that Kermani conveys and the central role of grief in the novel resonate with the thinking of Judith Butler, whose writing on these topics also tries to understand how the subject is formed through multiple relations with others and what this means for an ethical understanding of community. The link between a de-centred understanding of the subject and grievability in Dein Name has implications for our understanding of cosmopolitanism, as, through an emphasis on the imagination and on creative engagement with the world, the novel tries to reconcile the lack of any fixed ground and stable meaning on the one hand, with the need for understanding and some form of ground, however contingent and contestable, on the other.
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Humanities, 2020
There has traditionally been some divergence in the interpretive paradigms used by scholars analy... more There has traditionally been some divergence in the interpretive paradigms used by scholars analysing minority literature in the Germanophone and Anglophone contexts. Whereas the Anglosphere has tended to utilize poststructural and postcolonial approaches, interculturality and transculturality are favoured in the German-speaking world. However, these positions are aligning more closely, as the concept of similarity is gaining ground in Germany, disrupting the self-other binary in what can be regarded as a shift from the idea of roots to rhizomes. In dialogue with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the rhizome, the paradigm of similarity will be explored in terms of culture in Zafer Şenocak's essay collection Das Fremde, das in jedem wohnt: Wie Unterschiede unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhalten (The Foreign that Resides in Everyone: How Differences Hold Our Society Together, 2018), which explores the similarities between Turkish and German culture alongside their internal differences; in terms of language in Uljana Wolf's poetry cycle "DICHTionary" (2009), which seeks out links between German and English through 'false friends'; and in terms of religion in Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel's play Nathan Messias (Nathan Messiah 2006), which raises questions about interreligious dialogue. All three texts challenge binary notions of identity in favour of a more complex, rhizomatic network of relations.
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Gegenwartsliteratur, 2018
Labor migration from Muslim-majority countries to the Federal Republic of Germany between the 196... more Labor migration from Muslim-majority countries to the Federal Republic of Germany between the 1961 agreement with the Turkish government and the Anwerbestopp in 1973 was followed by family reunions and successive waves of political refugees and asylum seekers predominantly from the Balkans and the Middle East, leading to an increasingly visible Muslim presence in all areas of German culture, politics and society. The German literary scene is no exception, as the success of prize-winning authors who identify as Muslims, such as Navid Kermani and Feridun Zaimoglu, demonstrates. There has also been a notable post-9/11 rise in Islamic themes in German literary texts regardless of their author’s background, outlined by Karin E. Yeşilada’s study of the “Muslim turn.” Yet the literary writing of Emine Sevgi Özdamar seems to contradict this trend. It is her publications in the early 1990s, not her post-9/11 work, that deal primarily with Islamic themes. Although her position within the many debates surrounding Islam in German society is more difficult to ascertain than that of other writers, such as Kermani, who have enthusiastically adopted the role of public intellectual, Özdamar’s early semi-autobiographical works of fiction, including the novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus (1992, henceforth Karawanserei) and the short story “Großvater Zunge” (the second story in the collection Mutterzunge, 1990), raise questions that are central to debates over Islam’s place in society, be it in Germany or Turkey.
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Religion and Literature, 2017
The work of Navid Kermani and SAID frequently engages with religious themes and their respective ... more The work of Navid Kermani and SAID frequently engages with religious themes and their respective oeuvres foreground the diversity within Islam and blur religious dividing lines. In spite of their differences, the short stories “Von der Zärtlichkeit” (Of Tenderness) by Kermani and “ich, jesus von nazareth” (i, jesus of nazareth) by SAID invite comparison because they share a deconstructive engagement with the figure of Jesus, conveying a spirituality felt in the material, rather than the metaphysical world. Whereas the former depicts a mystical experience in which Jesus’s presence is felt without him being glimpsed, implying an ambiguous sense of the divine in withdrawal and of empty sacred space, the latter is an at times angry monologue delivered by Jesus, in which holiness is located in righteous action against injustice. Hence the former evokes issues of spiritual absence and presence through Jesus’s resurrection, whereas the latter conveys a sense of insurrection, underlining Jesus’s role as a social radical. Both texts, however, shift meaning away from a transcendent God and toward the world, suggesting a religiosity beyond identity and ideology which can be illuminated by bringing Jean-Luc Nancy’s non-dualist concept of the “deconstruction of monotheism” into dialogue with the texts’ Christian and Sufi allusions.
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Germanistik in Ireland, 2017
Navid Kermani's first novel 'Kurzmitteilung' emphasises the unspectacular. It unfolds against the... more Navid Kermani's first novel 'Kurzmitteilung' emphasises the unspectacular. It unfolds against the backdrop of the '7/7' bombings in London and yet this seismic event is not the main focus, despite the protagonist Dariusch's Iranian-Islamic background. Rather, it is the 'ordinary' death of Maike Anfang, a colleague he barely knows, that dominates his thoughts and confronts him with his own mortality. This constellation allows Kermani to contrast two opposing ideas of death, Maike's being without predetermined meaning and the terrorists' being imbued with meaning for ideological struggle, at least from their own perspective. A close examination of Dariusch's seemingly banal interactions with others (such as comforting grieving friends and helping the deceased's mother with funeral preparations) suggests a cosmopolitan sense of coexistence that can be illuminated by Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of community in the absence of a common identity or cause.
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Forum for Modern Language Studies, 51.1, Jan 2015
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Islam is increasingly being viewed as the Other of an enligh... more After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Islam is increasingly being viewed as the Other of an enlightened and tolerant Germany. Turkish-German author Feridun Zaimoglu and his co-writer Günter Senkel destabilize these Western assumptions in the play 'Schwarze Jungfrauen' (2006), in which performed monologues from the perspective of Muslim women evoke both fundamentalist and mystical (Sufi) manifestations of Islam. The play challenges contemporary cosmopolitan theory's engagement with religion, implying that its insistence upon the rational individual's exercise of free will is actually conducive to fundamentalism. Instead, 'Schwarze Jungfrauen' suggests, corresponding with Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy, that any hope of stemming religious fundamentalism rests not in the perpetuation of immanent identities and universalizing ideologies, but rather in notions of religiosity and community beyond representation. Thus, rather than acting as a barrier to cosmopolitan solidarities, Islam, in the form of Sufism, in fact provides inspiration for a non-identitarian religiosity that would avoid religion-based conflict.
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German Life and Letters, 67.3, Jul 2014
In the short story ‘Fünf klopfende Herzen, wenn die Liebe springt’ (2004) and the novel Hinterlan... more In the short story ‘Fünf klopfende Herzen, wenn die Liebe springt’ (2004) and the novel Hinterland (2009), Feridun Zaimoglu engages with cosmopolitanism and German Romanticism – both characteristic themes of his more recent fiction. A dialogue between the ideas of love presented by Jean-Luc Nancy and the Romantics Fr. Schlegel, Novalis and Kleist can illuminate the non-identitarian nature of Zaimoglu's cosmopolitanism, suggesting a radical openness to the future and an ontological interrelatedness in line with Nancy's ‘communauté désœuvrée’ (‘inoperative community’), rather than a new cosmopolitan identity with its own moral code. Just as the Romantics invested in the power of love to create a harmonious world, love is equally important for Nancy in that it renders the inoperative community more accessible to us. This understanding of cosmopolitanism can be glimpsed in ‘Fünf klopfende Herzen’, in which falling in love presents the protagonist with the radical possibilities brought about by the interconnected nature of being. Similarly, in Hinterland, in which transnational sensibilities create a cosmopolitan web across Europe, it is implied that being-with is not subordinate to being-one. Zaimoglu's engagement with the Brothers Grimm and the more nationalist aspects of Romanticism also requires close scrutiny, and can be illuminated by an appeal to Nancy's concepts of ‘myth’ and ‘literature’.
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Book Chapters by Joseph Twist
In Turkish Literature as World Literature, ed. by Burcu Alkan and Çimen Günay-Erkol (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 2021
The writer and public intellectual Zafer Şenocak (b. 1961 in Ankara) is well aware of the imbalan... more The writer and public intellectual Zafer Şenocak (b. 1961 in Ankara) is well aware of the imbalances in today’s globalized literary markets. Mass migration is, however, bringing about processes of cultural crosspollination that challenge traditional ideas of center and periphery. If, with David Damrosch, we regard world literature as encompassing “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (2003, 199), it can be argued that Turkish literature is increasingly playing such a role in Germany, where Turks currently form the largest ethnic minority (Statistisches Bundesamt 2018). As one-sided as the cultural exchanges between Germany and Turkey may appear, Şenocak’s own publications demonstrate that there is movement in both directions. He has written essays on Turkish and Ottoman literature, such as “Einen anderen Duft als den der Rose: Über türkische Volks- und Diwandichtung” (Another Scent than that of the Rose: On Turkish Folk and Divan Poetry, 1993), and he has translated the poetry of Pir Sultan Abdal (Şenocak 1988) and Yunus Emre (Yunus Emre 1986) into German. Moreover, his own literary and essayistic writing (in both German and Turkish) is inspired by authors and thinkers from both cultural spheres.
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Sarmatien - Germania Slavica - Mitteleuropa. Vom Grenzland Im Osten Über Bobrowskis Utopie Zur Ästhetik Des Grenzraums, ed. by Sabine Egger, Stefan Hajduk, Britte C. Jung (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2021), 2021
Semier Insayif’s experimental poetry collection “bodenlos” (2012) uses natural imagery in order t... more Semier Insayif’s experimental poetry collection “bodenlos” (2012) uses natural imagery in order to explore the ‘borderlands’ of language itself, be they between languages, between lexical units, between signifier and signified, between thoughts and their linguistic expression, or between morpheme and phoneme. In this regard, his poems not only convey the transnational perspective commonly associated with so-called minority literature and its interpretation, but equally challenge the unity of language and words in a fundamental way, deterritorializing language in a manner that resonates with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature. By bringing “boden los” into dialogue with the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, and other thinkers of continental philosophy, the way in which Insayif’s multifaceted exploration of language challenges notions of representation and semantic meaning-making can be delineated. Through a minor use of German, and to a certain extent Arabic, Insayif disrupts the power relations bound up in the conventional, representational use of language, creating the potential for creative, new ways of thinking.
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Dance and Modernism in Irish and German Literature and Culture: Connections in Motion, ed. by Sabine Egger, Catherine E. Foley and , Margaret Mills Harper (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 2019
From belly to dervish dances, dance plays an important role in how Turkey is both imagined and ma... more From belly to dervish dances, dance plays an important role in how Turkey is both imagined and markets itself abroad. Yet these forms of dance have become trivialized, often serving as tourist attractions whose popularity can be attributed to the way in which they seemingly affirm Orientalist stereotypes of immorality and irrationality. However, the short stories “Libidoökonomie” (Libido Economy) and “Der Kranich auf dem Kiesel in der Pfütze” (The Crane on the Pebble in the Puddle) from the writer Feridun Zaimoglu’s short-story collection Zwölf Gramm Glück (Twelve Grams of Happiness, 2004) rediscover the radical potential of these dances, which act as starting points for discussions about how we understand the concept of identity and subjectivity in the postmodern age. In “Libidoökonomie,” belly dance plays a role in undermining the violence of identity formation within the Self-Other binary, as it disrupts the defining power of the male gaze and ultimately unveils no hidden truth. In “Der Kranich,” an Alevi-Bektaşi semah ritual points towards a similarly non-appropriative openness, but in this instance towards the divine. This sense of spirituality can be contrasted with institutionalized religious identities since, rather than exegesis and divisive dogma, the ritual’s whirling dance derives its meaning from affective experiences beyond rational thought. Both dances imply an idea of subjectivity with a radically transformative potential. They convey a sense of self that is decentered and destabilized rather than being presumed to be unitary and sovereign over itself and others, challenging modernist views of dance and dancers that operate within the confines of a system of binary opposites, striving towards unity.
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Lyrik Transkulturell, ed. by Eva Binder, Sieglinde Klettenhammer and Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2016)
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Phantastik und Skepsis: Adelbert von Chamissos Leben- und Schreibwelten
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Books by Joseph Twist
Nancy is critical of communities based on a single guiding principle (be it God or Reason) and thus involving a universalizing core that leads to conflicts between identity groups. He proposes alternative notions of both religious faith (a postmonotheistic version with elements of mysticism) and community (spontaneous communities requiring no shared identity). Twist relates these arguments to post-9/11 debates over cosmopolitanism and religion, illuminating how the writers under study draw upon mystical Islam's deconstructive potential, finding divine insight in love, sex, music, pain, and beauty. Such a worldly and affective spirituality dispels associations between Islam and sexual conservatism while rejecting monotheistic ideology. Thus, unlike the homogenizing drive of universalist cosmopolitanism, these writers' nonfoundational conceptualizations undermine the twenty-first century's "clash-of-civilizations" narrative and open up space for new ways of coexisting.
Articles by Joseph Twist
Book Chapters by Joseph Twist
Nancy is critical of communities based on a single guiding principle (be it God or Reason) and thus involving a universalizing core that leads to conflicts between identity groups. He proposes alternative notions of both religious faith (a postmonotheistic version with elements of mysticism) and community (spontaneous communities requiring no shared identity). Twist relates these arguments to post-9/11 debates over cosmopolitanism and religion, illuminating how the writers under study draw upon mystical Islam's deconstructive potential, finding divine insight in love, sex, music, pain, and beauty. Such a worldly and affective spirituality dispels associations between Islam and sexual conservatism while rejecting monotheistic ideology. Thus, unlike the homogenizing drive of universalist cosmopolitanism, these writers' nonfoundational conceptualizations undermine the twenty-first century's "clash-of-civilizations" narrative and open up space for new ways of coexisting.