The past twenty years have seen the emergence of German-Turkish cinema as an integral part of postunification German cinema and transnational European cinema. Today Fatih Akin is considered one of the most innovative German directors, whereas Thomas Arslan, Yilmaz Arslan, Yüksel Yavuz, Ayse Polat, and Seyhan Derin provide filmic perspectives on the problems of first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants. In the same way that filmmakers, by playing with genre conventions and aesthetic registers, have moved beyond the early focus on guest workers and victim narratives, scholars have shifted toward an analysis of the hybrid identities mapped out by what is alternately called migrant cinema, diasporic cinema or accented cinema. But while the conventions of a “cinema of duty” have been left behind in favor of the “pleasures of hybridity,” analyses still focus primarily on questions of identity, whether defined as ethnic, multiethnic, or postethnic. Similarly, despite the radical expansion of space and subjectivity, the filmic scenarios of mobility, displacement, and belonging continue to be framed in the binary terms of alterity or in-betweenness. And while German-Turkish cinema has played a central role in the reconceptualization of European cinema, including its modes of production and exhibition, scholarly debates are still dominated by narrative and thematic analyses. It is one of the goals of this workshop to open up the scholarship on Turkish-German film toward cultural studies readings, reception studies, performance theories, institutional histories, formal analyses, and comparative perspectives.

In this two-day workshop, we want to take stock of more than thirty years of German-Turkish filmmaking, reassess some of the concepts that have informed critical engagement with these films, and identify topics and areas for future research. For that reason, we are looking for 45-minute presentations on ongoing research projects; the workshop contributions will be published in an anthology. Of particular interest are presentations on the following topics:

- German-Turkish actors and the performativity of (post)ethnicity,
- the role of film criticism and film festivals in the making of German-Turkish cinema,
- intersections between German-Turkish film and literature,
- Turkish-German perspectives on television, documentary, and the essay film,
- film subsidies, co-productions, and new models of film authorship,
- the exhibition, promotion, and marketing of German-Turkish films,
- film audiences and the question of spectatorship and identification,
- German-Turkish cinema in the context of a transnational European cinema, and
- comparative studies with other accented cinemas (Britain Asian, Beur Cinema).

The organizers will pay for hotel accommodations, all meals, and ground transportation in Austin.

Please send a one-page abstract and one-page CV by 15 October 2009 to Sabine Hake at Hake@mail.utexas.edu