Global Ethnoscapes in Migration Literature1

chapter 5 Global Ethnoscapes in Migration Literature1

Arjun Appadurai uses the term “global ethnoscapes” to describe places that are characterised by migration and mass media and that, especially since the 20th century, have become locations for the social, spatial, and cultural formation of group identities.2 The adjective ‘global’ indicates that these groups are no lon- ger tied to certain territories or particular areas but are to be seen in a bigger (i.e. in a global) context. In particular, they do not define themselves only with regard to their current place of residence but also with regard to distant places and groups (e.g. the homeland left behind or where their parents come from). The connections to these places are secured via mass media.3 Furthermore, Appadurai states that while these groups are heterogeneous they are also con- scious of having their own, common history as a group.4 In his seminal work on the effects of migration and mass media in the age of modernity, he defines ethnoscape as “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals”;5 however, he states that the term does not only include these groups of people, but also those that are not moving themselves. The latter too are increasingly confronted with ethnoscapes:

1 Earlier versions of this chapter have been published as: Sandra Vlasta, “Globale ethnoscapes’ in deutsch – und englischsprachiger Literatur im Kontext von Migration’, in Gedächtnis und Erinnerung in Zentraleuropa, ed. by András F. Balogh and Helga Mitterbauer (Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2011), pp. 245–258 and Sandra Vlasta, ‘Das Ende des ‘Dazwischen’ – Ausbildung von Identitäten in Texten von Imran Ayata, Yadé Kara und Feridun Zaimoglu’, in Von der nation- alen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration, ed. by Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 101–116. 2 See Appadurai, Modernity and Arjun Appadurai, ‘Global Ethnoscapes. Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology’, in Recapturing Anthropology. Working in the Present, ed. by Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), pp. 191–210. 3 Leslie Adelson too refers to the concept of long-distance affiliations secured via media (that Benedict Anderson also discusses with regard to the imagining of the nation) in her reading of Emine Sevgi Özdamars story ‘Der Hof im Spiegel’ [The Courtyard in the Mirror], though in order to show that it is the production of locality (also discussed by Appadurai), i.e. the pro- tagonist’s present in her apartment in Düsseldorf, that is in the foreground rather than the long-distance relations (to her relatives in Turkey). See Adelson, The Turkish Turn, pp. 41–49. 4 See Appadurai, Modernity, p. 48. 5 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 33.

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This is not to say that there are no relatively stable communities and networks of kinship, friendship, work, and leisure, as well as of birth, residence, and other filial forms. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move.6

Eventually, Appadurai suggests we replace terms used for entities such as vil- lages, communities, and localities with the term “ethnoscape”;7 thus, a global network characterised by migration and mass media replaces traditional units. Appadurai furthermore coins the terms mediascape, technoscape, finances- cape, and ideoscape that refer to the global networks of media, technology, finance, and the world of ideas and information, respectively.8 He uses the suffix-scape as it “allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes”.9 All of them are closely connected to the notion of ‘deterritorialization’, a process in which the traditional links between nation, culture, identity, and territory are dissolved and borders hitherto believed to be insur- mountable are shifted and overcome. Although Appadurai sees the process(es) of deterritorialization “at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms”,10 he also believes that it has new, positive, and creative potential, for instance when it comes to satisfying the longing for what Salman Rushdie has called “imaginary homelands”11 by way of films, media, journeys, etc. The growing importance of imaginary homelands brings with it a growing importance of the imagination per se in society, and with it, “new markets for film companies, art impresarios, and travel agencies, which thrive on the need of the deterritorial- ized population for contact with its homeland”.12 Although the imagination has always played an important role in societies’ cultural life – as myth, history, dreams, etc. – nowadays, in a “postelectronic world”,13 it has been allocated a particular role: “More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before.”14 This is due to mass media present- ing a variety of possible ways of life that can either be adopted or at least be

6 Appadurai, Modernity, pp. 33–34. 7 See Appadurai, Modernity, p. 64. 8 See Appadurai, Modernity, p. 33–37. 9 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 33. 10 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 38. 11 Cf. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands. 12 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 38. 13 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 5. 14 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 53.