Congist'26: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crisis

From Crisis to Creation: Migration and Identity in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Work

D2-S5-K1

14 May 2026, 16:30

20m

Kurul Odası (Istanbul University Faculty of Letters)

Oral Presentation Session 5.7 (Day 2)

Speaker

Gabriella Pelloni (University Of Verona)

Description

My paper aims to analyze the writings of E. S. Özdamar as a laboratory for reflecting on migration in its dual nature as both crisis and possibility. Özdamar’s oeuvre, awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 2022, is rooted in the experience of crossing languages, cultures, and borders, staging both the traumatic dimension of migration and its transformative potential.
First, I will read migration as identity crisis and opening, drawing on Derrida’s reflections on “unconditional hospitality” and Roberto Esposito’s “affirmative biopolitics”. Özdamar’s writing shows that identity is not a closed substance but a mobile, relational configuration, reshaped in encounters with alterity. Experiences of exile, migration, and nomadism thus contain the possibility of transforming mutual perception and reinventing oneself in the mirror of the Other.
Second, I will examine transgenerational trauma and transcultural memory in Özdamar’s work. As theorized by Astrid Erll and Alison Landsberg, transcultural memory shows how shared remembrance can transcend borders and articulate intersections between micro- and macro-history, revealing genealogical structures through which traumas are transmitted and reworked. In Özdamar’s narratives, spatial movements intertwine with genealogical journeys across Turkish and European history, exposing repressed tragedies and giving voice to victims excluded from official discourse.
Finally, following Derrida, Mikhail Epstein, and Wolfgang Welsch, I will analyze the construction of new identity in Özdamar’s texts. Her works exemplify forms of transgenerational narration in which a language changeover exposes power relations embedded in language, while also opening a space for reworking traumas through the estranging perspective of linguistic and cultural crossing. Literature, through its performative potential, not only represents crisis but transforms it into an opportunity for alternative identity models shaped by multilingualism and transculturality.