Friday, October 30th 3:15 – 4:45

Session Room: Loft 2

1) Leigh Saris, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Visiting the Enemy: Transnational Heritage Tourism in Greece and Turkey

While Greek Orthodox and Muslim populations lived side-by-side under the Ottoman Empire, the emerging Greek and Turkish nation-states drew upon differences in religion, language, and cultural background to define their national identities in opposition to one another. Notions of “age-old” conflict animated policy decisions like the 1923 Greek-Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange, which forcibly removed Ottoman populations from their homelands and permanently divided Greek and Turkish populations into religiously homogenous nations.  The policy and its victims were subsequently silenced in official and public discourse in Greece and Turkey, and the political relationship between Greece and Turkey remains hostile.  Further, the Greek-Turkish border is meaningful in a larger geopolitical setting, where it marks the regional division between Europe and the Christian “West” and the Muslim Middle East. Within this politically charged environment, Greek and Turkish descendants of the Population Exchange have recently formed organizations to preserve the memory of the Population Exchange and renew past connections through heritage tourism.  Touristic trips to the homeland provide a depoliticized arena for Greeks and Turks to build relationships with one another.  Many returning exchangee tourists find that they have much in common with the populations typically portrayed as enemy “others” in the nationalist textbooks they encountered in school. Their return travels bring to light collective family memories of exile and discrimination, common practices that dictate good hosting and guesting, and even shared foods, phrases, and cultural traditions.  In doing so, return tourism has facilitated the growth of an exchangee community working across hostile national boundaries for the protection of their shared history, heritage sites, and identity in larger public and political arenas.  These joint efforts reveal transnational categories of identification and belonging that challenge assumptions of difference inherent in Greek and Turkish nationalisms and destabilize geopolitical regional divisions that place Greece and Turkey at odds.

2) Gül Çaliskan, St. Thomas University
Forging Diasporic Citizenship

As ethnic and national identities continue to cause unrest throughout the world, diasporic peoples offer insights into whether and how such identities can be transcended. These multinational migrants are redefining what it means to be a citizen in a Western nation-state today. They are forging a new kind of citizenship.

German-born Turkish Berliners are a case in point. In a country with exceptionally strong traditions of ethnic and national identity, Turkish Berliners are contesting social exclusion while simultaneously creating new ways to live as transnational Germans. This paper examines what displacement means to Turkish Berliners in the context of their everyday encounters within German society. It is through these encounters that people’s complex understandings of social identity and belonging find expression. Such interactions open ephemeral ruptures in people’s sense of social reality. Although they are usually spontaneous and their effects fleeting, over time they can form patterns that set the outlines of social life. Beyond people’s social encounters, I investigate their longer-term practices. Practices emerge from personal initiative, vocational choice, and lived experience. They create wider possibilities for social change and more permanent ruptures with social conventions. I examine the encounters and practices of Turkish Berliners through the lens of narrative analysis. Analysis of their narratives leads to the conclusion that Turkish Berliners’ lives are articulated by social relations far larger than their immediate encounters.

In their daily encounters, the Ausländer open a rupture and thereby challenge prescribed roles and practices. Moreover, by interrogating the practices of exclusion, participants may change themselves: they come to understand their complex condition as a new type of citizenship. The paper summarizes the social, cultural, and political characteristics of such diasporic citizenship, offering a broader understanding of what citizenship means in an increasingly multinational, multi-ethnic Western society.
 
3) Mustafa Cakmak, Keele University
Hyperreal Identities and Postmodern Creoles: The Case of Turkish-speaking Diaspora in London

Cultural identity is described by Stuart Hall (1990) as collective or true self hiding inside the many other, superficial ‘selves’ that a people with common ancestry and shared history. According to Judith Butler (1990) speech act and communication are performative that define identities. According to this theory identities are constructed by performative actions, gestures and behaviours. The discourse regulates and strains identities. Especially repetitive statements have power on actions of individuals which is enforced by social norms. Identities are not stable but constructed within the discourse.

In this research, I analyse Turkish diasporic identity in London as a self-making identity. Social scientists tend to categorize them over their ethnic background. As Hall (2000) stated in common understanding identification is constructed on the recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics or with an ideal. However in discursive approach identification is perceived as a construction, never completed process which is always open to articulation and suturing. It can always be ‘won’, ‘lost’, maintained or abandoned (pg.16-17). However, identities are not fully fluctuating and not like a theatre performance. It is a long term performance rather than getting up want day and acting an identity and next day another.

This research questions how identity is constituted and maintained in diaspora environment? How do diasporic individuals negotiate between home and host cultures? And, how do they reinterpret cultural landscape? The paper relies on primary data collected from the field with flaneire ethnographic method. It includes analysis of visual material culture; bricolage and palimpsest are some of them.