Cultural texts born out of migration frequently defy easy categorization as they cross borders, languages, histories, and media in unpredictable ways. Instead of corralling them into identity categories, whether German or otherwise, the essays in this volume, building on the influential work of Leslie A. Adelson, interrogate how to respond to their methodological challenge in innovative ways. Investigating a wide variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that touch upon "things German" in the broadest sense-from print and born-digital literature to essay film, nature drawings, and memorial sites-the contributions employ transnational and multilingual lenses to show how these works reframe migration and temporality, bringing into view antifascist aesthetics, refugee time, postmigrant Heimat, translational poetics, and post-Holocaust affects. With new literary texts by Yoko Tawada and Zafer Senocak and essays by Gizem Arslan, Brett de Bary, Bettina Brandt, Claudia Breger, Deniz Goekturk, John Namjun Kim, Yuliya Komska, Paul Michael Lutzeler, B. Venkat Mani, Barbara Mennel, Katrina L. Nousek, Anna Parkinson, Damani J. Partridge, Erik Porath, Jamie Trnka, Ulrike Vedder, and Yasemin Yildiz.

bWinner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literaturesr
bHonorable Mention for The 2014 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studiesr
Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned mother tongue about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu).