De-essentializing ethnic identities through narrating a plural belonging: Aesthetics of postmigration in Zafer Şenocak’s novel Perilous Kinship (1998)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I will relocate Zafer Şenocak’s work within the aesthetics of postmigration. His novel Perilous Kinship ( Gefährliche Verwandtschaft 1998) can be regarded as an important attempt to challenge and change the political core narrative of Germany as a homogeneous society during reunification times. By contributing to the political and public discourses of national belonging, integration policies and immigration politics from the late 1990s onward, the novel’s fragmented, open-ended story can be seen as a distinct example for a narrative of postmigratory belonging that goes beyond territorial, ethnically essentialized and otherwise fixated constructions of cultural identities, including postcolonial and hybrid identity constructions. The novel, by style and structure, can be analysed through the lens of a transformative aesthetics that makes the visible invisible (and vice versa), undoes marginalization and in so doing demonstrates the construction of identity and society as plural and performative. It further challenges the perception of Berlin as a site of coherent national history by describing it as ‘The capital of the fragment’ and as ‘a city of immigration par excellence ’. My argument is that the protagonist’s multi-layered cultural identity construction as someone, who discovers his Jewish-German-Turkish family connections, draws parallels to the conceptualization of Berlin as a super-diverse metropolitan space.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".