Transnational and Transdiasporic Imaginations: Toward a New Reading of Heimat and Fatih Akın’s Soul Kitchen

The German word for home(land), Heimat, is often argued to generate static and exclusionary significations and holds a notable presence in far-right politics. In this talk, I engage this term in ways that inflect it with more transnational and progressive significations. Affect theory, I argue, helps unsettle radical sentiments and implications that Heimat may evoke. Centralizing affects and episodes of bodily breakdown in Fatih Akın’s Soul Kitchen, I demonstrate how the film reimagines Heimat to develop a structural critique of German society and create more empathetic collectivities along transnational and transdiasporic axes.

Varol Kahveci currently is a lecturer in German at Columbia University. His research specializes in 19th–21st-century literature, with a focus on postcolonial literacy and contemporary migration discourses at the intersection of art, literature, and media. His first monograph, provisionally titled “(Un)homely Encounters: The Poetics and Politics of Heimat between 19th Century Orientalism and Contemporary Literatures of Migration,” explores the German concept of Heimat (home/land), highlighting the indispensable role of cross-cultural engagements and the integral function of the so-called East in the construction of Heimat and German identities.