TRANSIT

Through a close reading of the works by the young Austrian author Milena Michiko Flašar, this article explores the complex role of given, assumed, and socially imposed names for transnational subjects. For the first- and second-generation migrants in Flašar’s texts, migration and translation are both liberating and encumbering: In her first text [Ich bin], translation across linguistic and ethnic borders serves as the perfect defamiliarizing impetus for aesthetic production, while in her novel Okaasan: Meine unbekannte Mutter the plurality of names for the migrant mother inhibits the second-generation daughter’s search for a true or authentic name for herself. Nevertheless, instead of an economy of translation where one name replaces another, Flašar shows her figures gradually developing the capacity to maintain multiple names in different languages. I argue that this replaces the conventional model of individual authenticity as self-congruence with one that does not demand hypermastery of self and that bears witness to the true complexity of transnational experience. A final analysis of Flašar’s breakthrough novel Ich nannte ihn Krawatte builds on these themes to show that even non-migrants and non-minority subjects have access to this same complexity, one which in Flašar’s words infuses a wohltuende Unsicherheit [beneficial uncertainty] into even the most hegemonic society.