F(r)ictions of Everyday Mobility

Abstract Highlighting the mobile, transnational, and translingual character of Afrodiasporic literatures in Germany, this article illustrates how contemporary Anglophone literary texts of the African diaspora in Germany not only challenge conventional understandings of what German-ness and ‘German literature’ means but also how their representations of (im)mobilities go beyond narratives of migration. By example of Olumide Popoola’s play Also by Mail (2013) and Musa Okwonga’s novel In the End, It Was All about Love (2021), I analyse how these texts depict Black characters as quotidian mobile subjects, addressing the plurality and relationality of practices and politics of (im)mobility in order to explore how these are intertwined with regimes of belonging and processes of racialisation in modern Europe. From a mobility studies perspective, the article employs the notion of friction to read the primary texts under scrutiny as fictions of everyday mobility that draw attention to the material conditions and embodied experiences of mobility and immobilisation while thinking (im)mobility also in terms of literary form.