AS SOON AS THEY ARE RECOGNIZED AS SUCH, Turkish German writers are obliged to represent Turkish Germans and Turks to Germans; Turkish Germans and Germans to Turks; and all three to others, on international circuits (Cheesman 2006). Only a writer with few or no pretensions to “literary” status can escape this compulsory ethnicization: Akif Pirinçci, whose prolific and popular work since 1980 is discussed in chapter 3, is unique in enjoying this advantage. By making this point, I perpetuate the ethnically determined gaze on the other and the self that pins down Turkish German writers as a group. This goes against the thrust of many recent works of theory and criticism concerned with cultures of migration or minorities. Postcolonial criticism tends to focus, instead, on the blurring of borders, the subversion of essences through syncretism, métissage, hybridity, mimicry, and masquerade, and on the cultivation of a liminal, creative “third space” (Bhabha 1996), “outside the nation.” This type of work is exemplified by Azade Seyhan's study of multiply-identified writers in Germany and the United States, Writing Outside the Nation (2001). Alternatively, as in the work of Leslie A. Adelson, the critical argument aims to go further still, and to deconstruct all the delimiting, binary metaphors, including that of the “third space,” that constrict writers' and readers' possibilities. Adelson seeks new metaphors in her articles “Opposing Oppositions” (1994) and “Against Between” (2001).