The word diversity hovers above the older German terms—Integration, Ausländer—but never quite replaces them. It creates an illusion of progress, an English-speaking surface that covers the older hierarchies underneath.

My favorite book, perhaps, is Gayl Jones’s *Corregidora* #bluesnovels #abstract open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

Both political and organizational authoritarianism rely on the same psychological fuel: fear. When people are afraid to get punished, excluded, or fired, they obey. But fear corrodes trust, and obedience born from fear is fragile. open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

Getting a Ph.D. is now something that teenagers at age 17 do.

The Crackdown open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

Family units are disrupted not simply for enforcement but to send a message: to deter, to frighten, to make everyone watching understand that belonging is conditional and precarious. Cruelty, here, is not a side effect but the point. The Deportationist: yasemintoron.substack.com/p/the-deport...

Die meisten deutschen Profs sind geistesgeschichtliche Zufälle. Keine bemerkenswerten Leistungen. Das einzige, was sie interessant macht ist die Germanisierung der lateinischen Sprache. "Negative Dialektik." Boom.

🥙 Goethe 🥙

Minimizing the legacy of their/our colonialism, European and U.S. scholars like to poetically shift accountability elsewhere: open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

The privileged discontent about a dysfunctional dishwasher.

"Upholding the ideals that have guided generations of Americans"

Unter dem Einfluss der Heldensage verlangt die gegenwärtige Kultur von uns eine kämpferische Haltung gegenüber den Widrigkeiten des Lebens. Kann man, muss man nicht erfüllen.

The Case for Separation | Argument für eine Trennung open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

Right-wing movements across Europe and the U.S. that seek to delegitimize the status of naturalized citizens as lesser or conditional citizens are not new but repeat older exclusions that sought to police belonging through 1. blood 2. soil 3. ancestry

Passdeutsche bedeutet eine Schlange von Leuten, die sich mit dem deutschen Pass an den Schalter für Nicht-EU-Leute stellen bis der oder die deutsche Grenzbeamte sagt, gehen Sie bitte durch und machen mir keine zusätzliche unbezahlte Arbeit. Frau Weidels Doktortitel versteht halt nix von Wirtschaft.

Very cool.

Why do male and non-immigrant colleagues still earn more money for more predictable and less public-facing jobs? Did the State seriously think immigrant women wouldn't find out? We did find out, and it is there for the bind between us to break.

Essay related to animals: open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

repost because it's necessary: Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex. -Frank Zappa

Göç sadece mekânın değişmesi değildir. Hafızanın da başka bir coğrafyaya yerleştirilmesidir. Migration is not just a physical change of place. It is also the adjustment of one’s consciousness to a different geography.

The answer that was asked of Michel Foucault in his prominent conversation with Werner Schroeter, who asked whether Foucault would go for passion or love, was actually a demand for a decision between two stories. Here's one that encourages both: yasemintoron.substack.com/p/lest-you-f...

It's my professional opinion that literature lectures shouldn't be subject to time constraints. They should take place spontaneously. Nothing has hurt us more than schedules and slots.

"Die stören die Leute! Die stören die Leute!" The expression of annoyance at protest as I experienced yesterday around Palestine and Gaza is not an expression of political neutrality. It is a culturally sanctioned affect, one developed through racialized and colonial histories of who gets to speak,

Unlike non-human animals, we ironize and ruin nature, and then ... wonder: open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

In Germany, summer is a foreign language.

The absence of a subject in dominant historiographies is not evidence of their non-existence but a function of authorial elision. open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

Es ist nicht so sehr die Amerikanistik, sondern die Interpretation der Amerikanistik als Politikwissenschaft, die das Feld tendenziell zu einem Haufen Kommentatoren macht, die keine inhaltlichen Fragen mehr haben. Man weiß alles über alles und jeden.

To all the genocide-enabling politicians who are now all worked up about the famine and starvation, fuck you. And a good morning to everyone else.

If you feel optimistic about where you are and where you go rather than where you come from, that may have to do something with a conception of the present and future as open and a conception of the past as closed. For immigrant writers, homeland can feel like dark DNA: substack.com/profile/3317...

Disappointments are painful and we’d rather avoid them and believe in the absurdist so it goes.

Every people felt threatened by a people without a country. (Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love) There are a couple of writings published in 1996 that are worth saving for eternity. So too "An Acoustic Journey" by Trinh T. Minh-ha, provided by OA for free: monoskop.org/images/a/a5/...

Midnight essay on cultural nationalism, literature, and bilingualism. open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

I am [first name] A word on self-introduction (With Spoiler for Turkish native speakers) open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

Are You Reading? open.substack.com/pub/yasemint...

In authoritarian and personality-driven structures, education has no value. People even think it's great when someone with a high school degree insults a doctoral student, seeing it as social justice. Both can be working class but the split between them is complete.

I just received a donation request for Gaza, and then the account was deleted. Don't do that.

Ernsthafte Solidarität mit Palestine wahrt den Blick auf Palestine und zieht ihn nicht auf Euch.

Be mindful of our little animal fellows in the inner city and try not to step on them.

You write about politics and then call it writing. In doing so, you avoid writing. Writing is a cultural technique for making language visible. Yet in most of your writings, language disappears in favor of silence.

Ethnic conflicts do not arise from differences themselves, but from the perception of differences as a threat.

University Kiel excellently shows that there is one world religion people cannot talk intelligently about. Whether followers or opponents, there is not one rational word about a Book. A developed disinterest in the other on the one hand and a lack of self on the other hand.

I see America’s being America again

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time. ―Jorge Luis Borges