Gözde Naiboğlu (Manchester) p.75-98
2010 Issue 3
Cultural Encounters in Contemporary German Cinema
Abstract
Leslie Adelson argues that the rhetoric of „in-betweenness‟ is the most common argument in migrant literatures and in that, it is not yielding. In this essay, I will explore how Akin challenges the long held rhetoric of cultural discrepancy in bringing the two poles together in his Gegen die Wand (2004) and Auf der anderen Seite (2007). I will search how he both subverts and resettles the sexual and cultural difference by revealing how gender, like nationality, is performed. I argue that in Gegen die Wand the characters have flexible identities that dissolve the clear-cut stereotypical representations, however this well-meaning, universalist discourse he follows in Auf der anderen Seite rasps the „difference‟ in order to highlight the sameness and thus Akin follows the reductivist discourse of nationalism.