This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that marries cultural geography and literary criticism to reevaluate traditional notions of what has been described as displacement or diaspora by shifting focus onto emplacement and locality. Responding to the thematic preoccupation with spatiality and movement in representative twenty-first-century texts like Emine Sevgi Ödamar's Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (Strange Stars Stare toward the Earth), Leila Aboulela's Minaret, and Teju Cole's Open City, I claim that these literary works envision radically new possibilities for migrants to attach meanings and symbolism to their everyday lived space. Specifically, I argue that migrants construct a sense of belonging in their new environment that manifests in affective or cognitive terms: as a sense of home and comfort and/or as a way of knowing. Employing a critical geographical conceptualization of "place" this dissertation analyzes examples from the German and Anglo-American context, concentrating in particular on intimate places like dwellings, parks, and neighborhoods, as well as on the city as a larger cultural construct. The last two chapters further develop the idea that new media—as represented in Nell Freudenberger's novel The Newlyweds and by Teju Cole's Twitter feed—produce new forms of community and interconnectedness. These bring the multiple homelands closer together than before and drastically alter traditional experiences of migration.
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