Ümmü in Alamania? Female Voice and Song in the Premiere Production of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Karagöz in Alamania (1986)

This article examines the premiere production of Özdamar's first play 'Karagöz in Alamania' (written 1982, premiered 1986) through the lens of Ümmü, Karagöz's often disregarded female co-protagonist. It analyses the postdramatic uses of song and female voice in the form of operatic singing, bluesy jazz, and American pop in the premiere production, and so highlights the importance of taking the realization of Özdamar's plays in performance into account in an analysis of the role of gender in her work. In doing so it reveals that Özdamar as director, Sonja Theodoridou as actor, the character Ümmü as dreamer and performer, and the songs of Eartha Kitt as unexpected intertext work together within the 1986 production to reveal the extent to which the historical circumstances of labour migration created new, yet often restrictive, female roles for Turkish women to play in Germany. A postdramatic reading of the play thus moves us away from an analysis of the characters as figures with hybrid identities and towards a focus on a political reading of the female character's situation made possible by a transmedial aesthetic.