Representations of the Other: An Intersectional Analysis of Julya Rabinowich's Die Erdfresserin (2012) Author(s): Hajnalka Nagy Source: Austrian Studies , Vol. 26, Austria in Transit: Displacement and the Nation-State (2018), pp. 187-201 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/austrianstudies.26.2018.0187 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Modern Humanities Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Austrian Studies This content downloaded from 143.205.176.60 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 08:54:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Representations of the Other: An Intersectional Analysis of Julya Rabinowich’s Die Erdfresserin (2012)* HajNALKA NAGY Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt I In the age of globalization, mass migration and transculturalization, traditional structures and frameworks of belonging such as home, culture and nation are destabilized. The transcultural turn in Cultural Studies of the new millennium has rejected any essentializing determination of collective and individual identity, as well as the idea of the nation-state, historically assumed to be monocultural and consistent. The global circulation of people, ideas, products and different kinds of signs — as Bronfen and Marius remark — turns up both personal and collective identity as an effect of the free play of signifiers.1 These changes also affect memory cultures, which become a conflicted field of representations.2 Today, not only has ‘the composition of memory communities’ been ‘dramatically reconfigured’, as Assmann und Conrad note, but so too have the ‘spaces of memory’.3 Memories are ‘carried across national borders’4 and in this way, they transform the memory culture of nation-states. Issues of identity and memory formation in the post-migrant era therefore give rise to further questions: how are cultures of memory reshaped by these transcultural effects and what does it mean when — to speak with Butler — subjects are not ‘intelligible’ or recognized due to prevailing discourses which mean their lives and suffering are not appreciated, let alone remembered?5 Investigating * I would like to thank Claudia Brunner, Viktorija Ratković, Áine McMurtry and Deb orah Holmes, as well as the anonymous reviewer, for their insightful comments and suggestions. 1 Elisabeth Bronfen and Benjamin Marius, ‘Einleitung’, in Hybride Kulturen. Beiträge zur anglo-amerikanischen Multikulturalismusdebatte, ed. by Elisabeth Bronfen, Benjamin Marius and Therese Steffen (Tübingen, 1997), pp. 1–30 (p. 3). 2 Ibid., p. 11. 3 Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, ‘Introduction’, in Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, ed. by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (Basingstoke and New York, 2010), pp. 1–16 (p. 1). 4 Ibid., p. 2. 5 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York, 2009), p. 64. Austrian Studies 26 (2018), 187–201 © Modern Humanities Research Association 2019 This content downloaded from 143.205.176.60 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 08:54:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 188 Hajnalka Nagy transnational and transcultural constellations in Cultural Studies, especially in Gender and Memory Studies, involves rethinking traditional concepts of culture, identity, homeland and collective memory just as much as dealing with the (im)possibility of representation, whereby representation has to be understood here in a double sense, in line with Spivak’s distinction between ‘proxy’ (Vertretung) as ‘treading in someone’s shoes’, speaking for somebody, and ‘portrait’ (Darstellung) as ‘placing there’.6 Julya Rabinowich’s literary work is situated directly on the conflict lines of post-migrant society and European transnational memory,7 since it questions — like Leslie Adelson in her famous manifesto — the concept of betweenness, often attributed to migrant authors, as denoting two static, self-contained ethnic and geographic worlds.8 Contrary to this attribution, Rabinowich redefines the transcultural situation of displaced people as a border zone in which subject positions, traditional concepts of culture and memory as well as commonplace patterns of interpretation and ideas must constantly be renegotiated. In this way, Rabinowich not only offers new insights into Austrian identity and collective memory by writing herself into the modern Austrian canon.9 She also reveals the heterogeneity of cultural heritage by taking up literary stories, myths and fairy tales of various provenances in order to deconstruct and charge them with new meaning. Last but not least — as is made clear in her novel Die Erdfresserin [The Woman Who Eats Dirt, 2012]10 — she addresses those mechanisms that consistently exclude and suppress the history of cultural ‘others’ from collective memory, by encouraging ‘a critical dialog about social justice and human rights’.11 Throughout her oeuvre, Julya Rabinowich’s texts engage with the human consequences of migration and displacement. Her first novel Spaltkopf [Splithead, 2008] tells the story of members of an intellectual family who 6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York, 1990), p. 108. 7 On the conflicted field of European Memory see Hajnalka Nagy, ‘Einübung ins Grenz(ge)denken. Deterritorialisierungen im europäischen Gedächtnisraum’, in Erinnern- Erzählen-Europa. Das Gedächtnis der Literatur, ed. by Hajnalka Nagy and Werner Wintersteiner (Innsbruck, 2015), pp. 269–94. Regarding powerful mechanisms of memory politics and ways of negotiating memories, historical experiences and their meanings, especially in Europe, see also Aline Sierp and Jenny Wüstenberg, ‘Linking the Local and the Transnational: Rethinking Memory Politics in Europe’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 23 (2015), 321–29. 8 Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Against Between: A Manifesto’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 29 (2003), 19–36. 9 For example in her Herznovelle [Heart Novella] (Vienna, 2011), in which she refers to Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle [Dream Story] (Berlin, 1926). 10 Julya Rabinowich, Die Erdfresserin (Vienna, 2012). In the following, references will be provided in the text. 11 Christina Eiko Guenther, ‘Julya Rabinowich’s Transnational Poetics: Staging Border- Crossings in Theater and Fiction’, Women in German Yearbook, 33 (2017), 128–56 (p. 129). This content downloaded from 143.205.176.60 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 08:54:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Representations of the Other 189 emigrate from Russia to Vienna, whose young daughter struggles to find her place in Austria but ultimately comes to accept her existence in a state of permanent transit. With the protagonist of her second novel, Die Erdfresserin, Rabinowich presents the story of a woman from the periphery who finds herself forced to work as a prostitute in Vienna to support her mother, sister and sick son left behind in Dagestan. The novel depicts experiences of violence and loss from a marginalized female perspective by posing the question of whether these experiences can be represented at all, and whether it is possible for disempowered women to speak for themselves within the dominant Western, masculine order.12 In this way, Rabinowich brings together the categories of ethnicity, gender and class with the problem of representation. The relations between identity, migration and cultural memory have been foregrounded in several studies on Rabinowich’s work.13 Monika Riedel’s analysis of Die Erdfresserin reveals how Diana, the protagonist, uncovers unequal relations between immigrants and local people also by questioning traditional gender roles.14 However, Riedel cannot provide a systematic intersectional approach because she does not consider the connections between patriarchy and capitalism as structural and ideological systems which forbid displaced women to act and speak as individuated subjects. The same holds true for Maria Mayr’s interpretation, which draws attention to the relations between globalization, neoliberalism and transnationalism in the novel, but reduces the problem to the ‘invisible structures [...] of neoliberal capitalism’, neglecting systematic consideration of Rabinowich’s critique of the patriarchy.15 Recently, Dominik Zink and Christina Eiko Guenther highlighted Rabinowich’s ‘contribution to the process of transnational memory-making’.16 Zink introduces the new term ‘intercultural memory’ to discuss the fundamental ‘incommensurability’ of memories in the transnational context.17 He shows how literary works — 12 This is also one of the central issues raised in Zink’s and Guenther’s work on Die Erdfresserin. Dominik Zink, Interkulturelles Gedächtnis: Ost-westliche Transfers bei Saša Stanišic, Nino Haratischwili, Julya Rabinowich, Richard Wagner, Aglaja Veteranyi und Herta Müller (Würzburg, 2017). 13 See, among others, Lena Ekelund, ‘Nomadinnen in Österreich. Transnationale Heldinnen in Julya Rabinowichs Romanen “Spaltkopf” und “Die Erdfresserin” ’, in Österreichische Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. by Heinz Ludwig