Literary co-memory in Sharon Dodua Otoo's novel Adas Raum. On the pluralisation of memory in German-language transnational contemporary literature

This article analyses the German-language debut novel Adas Raum by the Black writer Sharon Dodua Otoo in terms of a transcultural poetics of memory. Based on the concepts of ,Multidirectional Memory' (M. Rothberg) and ,Touching Tales' by Leslie A. Adelson, the author's way of deconstructing the conventional linear structure of space-time and constructing alternative conceptions of the subject is presented. Through narrative strategies such as the spinning of looping stories, the creation of temporal-spatial simultaneity, and the construction of female subjectivity as the intertwined fates of multiple women, which can also be seen as representations of one woman, the novel creates a kind of counter-narrative to hierarchical, competing discourses of memory. Adas Raum implements an inclusive dynamic. In this way, historically distinct events and the literary memory of them form a living, timeless unity that defies binary and excluding logics.