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The conditions of imagining and enacting agency, affiliation, and belonging in German theater have recently begun to change. In Ethnic Drag I charted the exigencies of speaking for and about Jews, Turks, Indians, and a range of nonEuropean subjects in situations largely marked by social exclusion and political discrimination.1 Ethnic drag, understood as the casting of native German actors in roles coded as racially or ethnically different, furnished a theatrical analogue for this situation, as it displaced the other and ventriloquized her voice. Understanding the performance of ethnicity as drag, that is, deploying drag as a critical device, helped foreground its substitutive logic and deconstruct racial and national ontologies on the German stage. Ethnic Drag picks up on Edward Said's description of the Orient as a theater, by detailing what roles, scripts, and styles German theater artists created, how spectators came to interpret them as mimetic representations, and what the social and political consequences of such performances might be. While the final chapter also considered critical deployments of ethnic drag by minority artists, very few of their plays had been published, much less performed in the municipal and state theaters, such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Keloglan in Alamania (1991).2 Unlike music, cinema, and literature, German theater has long remained nearly impenetrable for playwrights and directors of immigrant backgrounds. They might be expected to imagine postorientalist stories and characters analogous to what scholars like Azade Seyhan, B. Venkat Mani, Leslie Adelson, and Tom Cheesman have theorized as transnational, cosmopolitan literatures of migration and settlement.3 Hybridity, mimicry, and performativity, key critical tropes in postcolonial theory since Homi K. Bhabha, were adapted for theories of transnational literature and almost never theorized out of performance practices. Now that artists of Turkish descent are beginning to contest more widely the orientalist scripts and drag practices long predominant on the German stage, I would like to revisit ethnic drag as a theatrical practice and critical trope. How does it extend beyond the deconstructive gesture of refusing essentialist identities and help envision new, cosmopolitan forms of postnational belonging and European settlement? Can it escape the symbolic violence of substitution written into the long tradition of ethnic drag and mobilize instead empathy and solidarity across ethnic, national, and sexual lines?
I pursue...