(Un)Making Linguistic Borders

Perspectives from Contemporary Post-German Poetry

Abstract

Building upon Yasemin Yildiz’s seminal reflections on the postmonolingual condition and responding to the call for a postlingual perspective articulated by yasser elhariry and Rebecca Walkowitz, this paper proposes the term ‘post-German’ as a more nuanced descriptor for poetry published in Germany from 1989 to 2020. Through close readings of poems by José F.A. Oliver, Uljana Wolf and Xoşewîst, the study explores how these texts – each responding to historical contingencies spanning the local and the global – offer a critical interrogation of borders and the practices of bordering in relation to nationalism and belonging. Crucially, this politico-cultural critique is inextricably bound to a linguistic inquiry, illuminating the aesthetic dimensions of the issues addressed. By alternately effacing and reinforcing linguistic boundaries, the poems interrogate their arbitrariness and conventionality, thereby exposing monolingualism as a historically contingent and ideologically constructed paradigm. In doing so, they challenge entrenched understandings of language as a fixed, discrete and countable entity, while simultaneously raising profound questions for literary scholarship. Ultimately, they not only contest literary taxonomies structured around linguistic difference but also demonstrate the necessity of reassessing established interpretive methods.

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