My dissertation traces the emergence of marginal poetic forms that articulate ambivalent experiences of displacement. Ranging from newspaper and letter writing to essays, novellas, and travelogues, I argue that these forms critique notions of community that presuppose permanence and presence and imagine belonging in an inclusive yet transitory state. While scholarship on migration to date focuses on identity formation in opposition to the national canon, my dissertation uncovers historical-theoretical foundations for the understanding of contemporary migration literature in classical literature and philosophy. Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Yoko Tawada mobilize Heinrich von Kleist and Heinrich Heine in their attempts to defy ethnic borders in present-day Europe and sketch transnational forms of alliance. Grounding the analysis of the contemporary in nineteenth-century Germany, my work contributes to the understanding of mobility as a driving force of literature. What I call “fugitive form” combines the Frankfurt School’s emphasis on historical experience with a Derridean account of writing, conceptualizing forms that render fugitivity perceptible as a political strategy.
Chapter 1, “Epistemology of the Fugitive,” focuses on Kleist’s restless travelling, his system of notes and sketches, and the continuous engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy. Kleist’s improvisatory essay “On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts during Speech” breaks with established orders while transforming the German sentence structure. The novella “The Beggar Woman of Locarno” challenges notions of linear causality in Kant with historically complex structures, outlining fugitive justice as one basis of community.
Chapter 2, “Ephemeral Community,” analyzes Kleist’s proto-nationalist newspaper project “Germania,” which attempts to relate the people to their own voice, conflicting with the medium’s fleetingness. In contrast, his novella “The Earthquake in Chile” opens up hospitality as a way of safeguarding the racialized Other. The poetic reworking of the Haitian revolution in “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo” complicates notions of freedom and unfolds an interminable master-slave dialectic that liquifies solid categories of blackness and whiteness.
Chapter 3, “The Errant Journey of Self,” follows Heinrich Heine’s early travelogues, which develop a transnational idea of liberation grounded in national cultures. Grappling with the loss of a clear sense of place, Heine transforms Hegelian notions of relation and becoming in a poetics of writing that mediates Self and Other through seemingly endless associations. Heine’s “Rabbi of Bacherach” imagines a Spinozist community around the Marrano, a converted Jew, opposing patriarchal law and welcoming religious difference.
Chapter 4 engages with Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s and Yoko Tawada’s writings beyond European borders. Challenging liberal regimes of control, Özdamar’s short prose, especially “On the Train,” addresses mobility justice in the historical moment of labor migration. Tawada’s multimedia pieces perform fleetingness against ossified identities and project dynamic interconnections between Europe and its outside. I read her travelogue “U.S. + S.R.” as a poetic remediation of digital mutability that mirrors the fleeting constitution of a social bond not predicated on fixed national properties and languages. In light of current debates about Heimat, my dissertation concludes that fugitive writing opposes ethno-nationalist forms of exclusion and that it constitutes an open-ended project of making space for absent Others who are yet to arrive.
