Proposal for Final Work

Migration from outside to Turkish mainland is not a novel experience which for the case Balkans goes back to the population exchanges in the aftermath of the First World War. Waves of migration occurred during 70’s and 80’s and lastly during after the Bosnian war in early 90’s. Hence the common acceptance of Bosnian/Balkan identity as not in conflict with the Turkish identity as the mainstream nationalistic discourse suggests, I think that this specific issue of Bosnian migrants lacks in the academic literature which gave me an incentive to write my research on.

I’m interesting on how their self perception of identity with relation to the official institutional discourse, both of the states and of their local institutions, has formed. Do they belong to their places of nationality or do they belong to the place where they moved to? What’s the interplay in between? If there’s any.

I’ll conduct my research focusing to the two (may be one?) districts of Istanbul (Pendik and Bayrampaşa-Yıldırım) where Bosnian migrant community has a population density. Other than relying on the academic literature I’ll be conducting in-depth interviews and since the community also has many foundations, associations, etc so I’ll be also looking at their official discourses.  Along with the interviews, the articles and websites which were listed below will help me through the process.

-       Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham, 2001. 'How national citizenship shapes transnationalism: A comparative analysis of migrant claims-making in Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands' Transnational Communities Working Paper Series, WPTC-01-10. Oxford: ESRC/University of Oxford, pp.1-42

-       Georgescu, Oana. "“I am a Swede born in Bosnia with roots from Montenegro”-Communication and identity development for second generation immigrants in Sweden–a pilot study." (2012).

-       Voloder, Lejla. "Secular citizenship and Muslim belonging in Turkey: migrant perspectives." Ethnic and Racial Studies ahead-of-print (2012): 1-19.

-       Kirisci, Kemal. "Refugees of Turkish origin:“coerced immigrants” to Turkey since 1945." International Migration 34, no. 3 (1996): 385-412.

-       Fassmann, Heinz, and Rainer Munz. "European east-west migration, 1945-1992." International Migration Review (1994): 520-538.

-       http://193.170.80.15/vid/download/paa07_fliegenschneeetal.pdf

-       Türkiye Bosna Hersek Kültür Dernekleri Federasyonu

-       Bayrampaşa Bosna Sancak Kültür Yardımlaşma Derneği

-       Istanbul Anadolu Yakası Bosna Sancak Derneği

-       Pendik Bosna Sancak Sosyal Yardımlaşma Kültür Derneği

-       Sefaköy Çağdaş Bosna Sancak Dayanışma Eğitim Kültür Derneği

-       Alibeyköy Sancaklılar Kültür Yardımlaşma ve Dayanışma Derneği

-       Çağdaş Balkan Türkleri Dayanışma Eğitim Kültür Derneği

Immigrants and immigrant suffering

In this very last week of our class we’re assigned to read two articles, one is by Sidonie Simith and Gisela Brinker-Gabler " Introduction: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in the New Europe ” and the other one is by Madelaine Hron “ Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture ” . The first article is very interesting gives a general understanding of the international politics and has a gender perspective but I think it is kind of hard to focus on a single blog post so I’ll be focusing on the latter one.

The article begins by providing some facts from migration todays world. And some very striking statistics mentioned that by 2005 there were around 34 million uprooted people worldwide and roughly 22% of this people are hosted at unstable countries like Iran and Pakistan. Of course the numbers don’t show any suffering of the immigrants but still gives a framework of how big is the issue.

One another important aspect of the article is a clear up attempt of the terminology. At this point I think the quote from Iva Pekarkova is meaningful. She remarks on ‘suffering enough’ to point out the distinction between immigrants and refugees and satirizes this with what she calls the ‘legal language game’ which we’ve also talked a couple of times in class ( also in one of the previous readings there was this men pretending as if to get the asylum etc.)

Academic exile vs. Immigrant I think is also important and we perhaps will be talking over it during the class.

........

And on the pain part... There’s again another great quote (this week It seems like I’m on the literature side but there are really great quotes which speak for the issue in a very dense way. Well chosen by the author) , one from Virginia Woolf who observed that literature rarely portrays bodily pain in her essay “On Being Ill”;

“English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear,”  “has no words for the shiver and the headache…. but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

How perfectly expressed the hardness of expressing pain for a native, expert on the language...Which brings the hardship of translating (the author takes immigrant expressions as translations) the pain to another language! Do you think Pain really needs to be translated? that it is not something universal?

Through this pain and translation the article also looks to the framework of culture, genre, target language and target rhetoric ... One striking point is about the role of pain in social discourse that as politics of pain which address to Nietzche’s ‘power of the weak’. This I think is a legitimate argument in itself up to a point, but remembering the nasty outcomes of the ideology the motto turns out far repulsive to me.

Above I’ve tried to highlight the parts of the reading which are catchy to me. Some class mates were complaining about last weeks’ Derrida readings but I think this week reading are high loaded and there are many things to focus on even in one piece not something to come up with a few basic ideas. seems like too many things to cover this last week before going on with our proposals.soo see you all on monday....

Final Paper Proposal/attempt

Hello my dear friends/ followers (since these two words stand as synonyms for my blog it won’t be wrong to use it this way :P )

It’s been a long time without any posts and It also took me some time to decide on my final paper subject. Initially I wanted to write on the ‘illegal’ Armenian migrants in Turkey (remember we talked it in the class, the ones that our Prime Minister Erdoğan announced that he is aware of them but overlooks.)Anyway to find a gate was very hard especially because there is a time concern so I talked with Anine that I have an alternative idea to work on Bosnian migrant community in Istanbul which has a population density in two district of Istanbul, Pendik and Bayrampaşa-Yıldırım. I’m interesting on their perception of identity and also interesting on the differences in discourses. Do they belong to their places of nationality or do they belong to the place where they moved to? What’s the interplay in between? If there’s any I mean. The community also has many foundations, associations, etc so I’m also willing to look at the official discourse too.

I’ve also found a couple of academic articles related to the issue, unfortunately not so much dealing with the recent 1992-1995 migration but I think it’s manageable when combined with our course material.

So I think that’s all for now but if you have any suggestions, critiques, comments, etc I’ll be happy to hear.