THE DISPLEASURES OF HYBRIDITY A CRITICAL APPROACH TO CINEMA BY AND ABOUT PEOPLE WHO MIGRATED FROM THE REGIONS OF TURKEY AND NORTHERN KURDISTAN TO GERMANY MASTER'S THESIS Filiz Emine Dağcı, B.A. Presented to The Department of Media and Culture Studies – Gender Studies (Utrecht, NL) & The Department of Social Sciences (Hull, UK) Utrecht University & University of Hull in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the GEMMA double-degree Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies Utrecht University (NL) & University of Hull (UK) August 2015 dr. Christine Quinan, Main supervisor dr. James Turner, Support supervisor Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies THE DISPLEASURES OF HYBRIDITY A CRITICAL APPROACH TO CINEMA BY AND ABOUT PEOPLE WHO MIGRATED FROM THE REGIONS OF TURKEY AND NORTHERN KURDISTAN TO GERMANY MASTER'S THESIS Filiz Emine Dağcı, B.A. Main supervisor: dr. Christine Quinan (Utrecht University) Support supervisor: dr. James Turner (University of Hull) Thesis submitted to Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities and University of Hull, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences 2015 Acknowledgements “Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. But how free are they? And how free do they think?” Rosa Luxemburg I wish to express my sincere thanks to the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation for five years of ideational and monetary sponsorship that made it possible to pursue my studies. My Rosa-Luxemburg scholarship and the many beautiful comrades I was honored to meet during this time hopefully assisted me to become one of many freely thinking dissenters, because “if 'freedom' becomes 'privilege', the workings of political freedom are broken” (Luxemburg, Die russische Revolution. Eine kritische Würdigung, 1920: 109). I am also grateful to dr. Christine Quinan, lecturer, in the Department of Media and Culture Studies – Gender Studies at Utrecht University (NL), and dr. James Turner, lecturer, in the Department of Social Sciences at University of Hull (UK). I am extremely thankful and indebted to them for sharing their expertise, sincere and valuable guidance and encouragement. I also place on record, my sense of gratitude for my beloved father who never ceases to make me feel proud for my transnational working-class roots. From him I inherit and want to pay justice to a family-line of political activism that even resists times of unjust persecution, torture, and exile. THE DISPLEASURES OF HYBRIDITY A CRITICAL APPROACH TO CINEMA BY AND ABOUT PEOPLE WHO MIGRATED FROM THE REGIONS OF TURKEY AND NORTHERN KURDISTAN TO GERMANY Filiz Emine Dağcı, M.A. Utrecht University (NL) & University of Hull (UK), 2015 Supervisors: dr. Christine Quinan & dr. James Turner Abstract The thesis provides a critical perspective onto cinema by/about people who migrated from Turkey and Northern Kurdistan to Germany and their descendants – the post-migrants. As the topic deals with issues of cinema, I first discuss the virtual-real character of images with Slavoj Žižek's take on the Lacanian triad, the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. This leads me to theorize the virtual character of power to underscore that the production of images are a key factor in the creation of European hegemony. I then hint to the danger of victimizing (post-) migrants in the global North as solely located at the margins, which obscures moments of possible complicity in hegemonic forces. In my analysis of current academic literature on the cinema under consideration, I found a predominant teleological narrative of progress to freedom and self-re(-)presentation, which is a frame that re(-)produces colonial concepts of time and development. Despite that more recently produced films are widely theorized to resist the hegemonic notion of monocultural nationality through a celebration of hybridity, I show that this can also be understood as a contribution to the 'ethnic' branding and a re(-)shaping of European virtual power. In the analysis section, a critical examination of Fatih Akın's film Im Juli (2000) in contrast with Yüksel Yavuz's Kleine Freiheit (2003) provides an alternative to the unquestioned application of the myth of equal mobility in Europe. By applying conceptual metaphor theory to Hark Bohm's film Yasemin (1988) and Akın's Crossing the Bridge (2005) I then contrast a multicultural with a feminist decolonial notion of the bridge-metaphor. Finally, I provide a counter-reading of cinematic history in making continuities of Orientalist narratives on (post-)migrant femininities and masculinities visible. The critical economic analysis of discourses on (post-)migrants offers an unconventional reading together of cinematic images and German labor market and citizenship policies. Table of Contents ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................5 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ..........................................................................................8 1. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................9 2. REFLECTIONS ON SELF-LOCATION, RE(-)PRESENTATION, VISION, AND THE MAKING-OF IMAGES ....................................................................................15 2.1 The Making-of 'Identity' ..................................................................................19 2.2 The Making-of 'Europe' ...................................................................................25 3. METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................31 3.1 Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Discourse Analysis ....................................31 3.2 Application of Postcolonial Theory .................................................................33 4. PROBLEMS OF TERMINOLOGY ..........................................................................38 4.1 'Identity', Liminality and the Making-of the Real ............................................41 4.2 Methodological Nationalism and the Possibility of Complicity ......................48 5. A CRITIQUE OF SCHOLARLY LITERATURE IN THE FIELD OF 'TURKISH-GERMAN' CINEMA .........................................................................................................55 5.1 Cinematic History as a Teleological Narrative to Progress and Freedom .......56 5.2 Ethnic Branding of 'Europe' – Strategies of Global Expansionism .................65 5.3 Homi Bhabha's Hybridity as an In-Between ....................................................73 6 6. AN ANALYSIS AGAINST THE GRAIN ..................................................................83 6.1 The Myth of Mobility ......................................................................................84 6.2 Metaphoric Bridges – Between Pleasure and Pain ..........................................93 6.3 To Be continued: Orientalist Narratives .........................................................101 6.3.1 To Be Continued: Oriental Femininities Breaking free ..............................102 6.3.2 To be continued: Oriental masculinities in Generational Progress ............. 115 7. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................121 8. BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................126 9. FILMOGRAPHY .................................................................................................138 7 List of Illustrations Image A: Daniel and Juli at the 'Hungarian'-'Romanian' border ................................................... 89 Image B: Baran and Chernor longing for departure at the Hamburg harbor in Kleine Freiheit ... 92 Image C: Movie poster of Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul ......................................... 93 Image D: book cover of This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga in 1981 ............................................................................................................................. 97 Image E: Major weekly magazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror) with a circulation of at least one million, titles: “Allah's disenfranchised daughters. Muslim women in Germany” (November 2004) ............................................................................................................................................ 106 Image F: Deniz's self-confident breakup from her white 'German' partner in Der schöne Tag . 107 Image G: Umay (Sibel Kekilli) finds liberation and a new loving partner in the workplace in Die Fremde ........................................................................................................................................ 108 Image H: In Anam women find empowerment in each other at their cleaning jobs .................. 109 Image I: The oppressive father figure in Yasemin ....................................................................... 115 Image J: Erol (Tamer Yiğit) performing an ethnicized hyper-masculinity ................................... 117 Image K: Ali Aksu (Tuncel Kurtiz), served by his live-in sex-worker Yeter (Nursel Köse) in Auf der anderen Seite .............................................................................................................................. 118 Image L: Post-migrant professor of German language and literature studies Nejat Aksu (Bakir Davrak) in Auf der anderen Seite ................................................................................................ 119 8