Anti‐Blackness, Canonicity, and (Mis‐)Identification in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's <i>Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum</i>

Abstract This essay explores the disturbing presence of anti‐Black language and tropes in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's recent, celebrated novel Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum . Drawing on Toni Morrison's classic analysis in Playing in the Dark , I argue Özdamar's anti‐Blackness is characterized by a double‐valence: on one hand, Özdamar's anti‐Blackness partakes of the racializing clichés anatomized by Morrison and stakes a claim to whiteness and canonicity on their basis; on the other, this anti‐Blackness is continuous with a tendency towards racialized self‐mockery in the whole of Özdamar's oeuvre, as if Özdamar imagined these scenes to be produced from within Blackness and/or as a gesture of minoritarian solidarity. The text is structured by a problematic (mis‐)identification with Black abjection and a desire for whiteness. Özdamar thus participates in both an avant‐gardist tradition of transgression and a liberal logic of post‐raciality in which racializing tropes are free for unlimited literary appropriation.