Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyze five Danish literary examples (texts by Geeti Amiri, Yahya Hassan, Tarek Omar, Hassan Preisler and Abdel Aziz Mahmoud) in the context of the ongoing public debate on Danishness. The chosen writers deal with a migration experience and they point out the impossibleness of becoming Danish in the eyes of the ethnic Danish society. The notion of Danishness is undergoing changes, but as my reading of the texts has shown, the non-ethnic Danish writers conceptualize it as being founded in a greater degree on the unreachable criterion of being (rather than on knowing or doing) – using Joshua A. Fishman’s categories.