Annette Wierschke
Schreiben als Selbsthauptung: Kulturkonflikt und Identität in den Werken von Aysel Özakin, Alev Tekinay und Emine Sevgi Özdamar - Mit Interviews.
Frankfurt am Main: IKO - Verlag fur Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1996. First edition. 3889391109 291 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 6" x 8.5", shows light shelfwear. Binding is sound. Pages 249-270 (final interview) display pencil markings. Pages are otherwise clean and bright. Text is in German.
Originally presented as the author's doctoral thesis 
"My dissertation investigates how migration to Germany and the experience of cultural/social Otherness and marginality are conveyed in the writings of three Turkish women writers: Aysel Ozakin, Alev Tekinay and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar. My key interest lies in examining how ethnicity, gender, class and education interact in the construction of selfhood, identity and difference in the literary works of these three authors and how they negotiate their various subject positions in their work. My study interrogates how cultural identity and personal subjectivity are portrayed and possibly transformed, how the subjectivity and selfhood of their protagonists express concerns of interculturality/multiculturality and which models are offered for solving the intercultural tensions and inner conflicts of living between two cultures and their value systems. As also becomes evident in my interviews, all three authors chose different paths in positioning themselves vis-a-vis Turkish as well as German culture and in constructing their protagonists' as well as their own subject positions. I am investigating how Aysel Ozakin, Alev Tekinay and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar present their cultural backgrounds and negotiate issues of difference and marginality in a situation of accelerated socio-political and cultural change in a Germany that is slowly starting to reveal a growing awareness of its factual multiculturality. Ethnography, minority discourse and feminist theory provide crucial tools for examining these authors' narratives regarding questions of personal and cultural identity, authenticity, positioning, the problem of the "native informant", and tokenism within the field of German literature and politics"