Introduction 1

Notes Introduction 1. This anecdote is recounted with an appreciative nod to Keith Ashley. 2. Seyhan offers a more sustained comparison between Turkish–German and Chicana literatures at real and metaphoric borders (2001: 99–124); see also Sieg 240. See Faist for a comparison of social contexts (1995). For a sophisticated critique of comparative methodologies, see Melas (1995, 2006). A special issue of Diacritics addresses shifting conditions of comparison (Cheah and Robbins). 3. The phrasing reappears in Appadurai 2000. In Modernity at Large Appadurai stresses “the work of the imagination” in social life (3 and passim). This empha- sis is important for my discussion of literary work in the 1990s. Appadurai has also contributed to an interdisciplinary project on public spheres and “new imaginaries” associated with the Center for Transcultural Studies (Gaonkar and Lee). My study engages more directly with Appadurai’s earlier book, which makes more pointed claims about the nexus of migration, mediation, and imagination. 4. This proposal intends only to loosen up scar tissue that has thickened intractably around rhetorical worlds that migrants are thought to inhabit. Philosophies of worldliness are not addressed. 5. The performance artist defines the Fourth World as “a conceptual place where the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas meet with the deterritorialized peoples, the immigrants, and the exiles” (1996: 7) and the Fifth World as virtual space mediated by new electronic technologies. 6. Some also note the “historical amnesia” that attends contemporary discussions of transnationalism and globalization (Cohen and Dever 27). 7. Many individuals feel caught “between two worlds.” The rhetorical conceit is always within easy reach, shorthand for complex subjective and social processes in flux. The claim of historical obsolescence applies to the analytical purchase of the conceit. 8. Rimmon-Kenan explains that the “deep structure” of a story is paradigmatic, while the “surface structure” is syntagmatic (10). 9. See Appadurai on degrees of fluidity between premodern and modern approaches to ethnic cohesion (1996: 139–157). See also Gaonkar on “alternative modernities” (2001). 10. Benhabib aptly criticizes two “faulty epistemic premises” in contemporary politics: “(1) that cultures are clearly delineable wholes; (2) that cultures are congruent with population groups” (2002b: 4). 174 / notes 11. Compare Cohen and Dever’s geometrical definition of a “zone” as “a structure produced through the intersection of other structures that are coherent formations in their own right” (2). 12. Irzık and Güzeldere address the rhetorical tenacity and analytical impoverishment of understanding Turkey as a bridge “between two worlds.” 13. See Levent Soysal for additional evidence of this fable’s forceful presence in studies of migration and globalization. As he critically observes, “Despite the changes occurring in [the] transnational geography and the imaginary of migrancy, and almost four decades after its arrival in our scientific and everyday lexicons, the term Gastarbeiter continues to captivate our scholarly and popular imagination....In our narratives, migrants, and Turks in particular, appear as perpetual guest workers, arrested in a state of cultural and social liminality” (2003: 493). Analytically indebted to Yasemin Soysal’s scholarship on political membership, Levent Soysal stresses the need for a new critical approach to “the migration story” (494). By his account, the sociology of labor that once attached to the international figure of the guest worker has yielded to a widely accepted narrative positing migration as a story about cultural identities instead (498). 14. Leggewie decries excessive celebration of hybridity as a weak antidote to the “social pathology” ascribed to immigrants “ ‘between the cultures’ ” (2000: 882). See the introduction to Bronfen, Marius, and Steffen for one example. For critical approaches to hybridity in Germany, see Faist 2000a: 44–45, Wägenbaur, Umut Erel in Gelbin, Konuk, and Piesche (172–194), Terkessidis 1999, and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez in Hess and Lenz (36–55). Chow criticizes theoretical models that confuse hybridity with freedom. For relevant migration histories, see Bade; Hochstadt; Bade and Weiner; Castles, Booth, and Wallace; Castles and Miller; Sassen 1996, 1999; Sackmann, Peters, and Faist. See also Uen and Goldberg for publications by the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen. In 2003 an association calling for a “migration museum in Germany” was founded in Cologne to address the lapse of memory that prevails in Germany about migration history (Migrationsmuseum). Yalçın-Heckmann speaks of the 1990s as a period of heightened interest in that history, as reflected in new associations, exhibits, and film projects. 15. The legal category of “minority” was long reserved in Germany for autochtho- nous groups such as Sorbs, Friesians, and Danes (Schmalz-Jacobsen and Hansen 341). Turks without German citizenship are technically “foreigners.” A lexicon of ethnic minorities reflects a terminological shift by including a section on “the Turkish minority” (Schmalz-Jacobsen and Hansen 511–528). 16. As Levent Soysal observes, the figure of “the Turk” in Germany also acquires symbolic status in migration studies generally (2003: 500). If 80 percent of Turks in Europe resided in Germany prior to unification (Ardagh 241), casual references to Turkish migrants “in Europe” also indicate the symbolic status of Turks in Germany. More concretely, Turks bore the brunt of racism in West Germany long before the surge of attacks following national unification (Castles, Booth, and Wallace 100). See Kurthen et al. on post-unification developments. 17. Benhabib offers a sophisticated variation on this theme by arguing forcefully for deliberatively “democratic dialogue” as distinguished from multiculturalist dialogue (2002b: ix and passim). By her account, “intercultural justice between notes / 175 human groups should be defended in the name of justice and freedom and not an elusive preservation of cultures” (8). Benhabib’s understanding of dialogic complexity derives from her critique of models and movements that treat cultures as “seamless wholes” (25). 18. On “bridge” rhetoric, see especially Moray McGowan 1997, 2000b, and 2004 in literary studies or Waldhoff et al. in social sciences. Adelson 2001 is also relevant. 19. As Ausländer demonstrates, “Christian” and “secular” are sometimes deployed as complementary rather than contradictory terms in debates about religion and immigration. 20. The 1950s marked “the onset of large-scale labor migration” in transnational markets (Yasemin Soysal 1994: 145), and the 1960s marked crucial change involving “global foreign investment flows” and “massive new migrations” (Sassen 1988: 3). Lee and LiPuma trace new developments in capitalism to 1973. 21. For medium-specific alternatives, see Göktürk and Mennel in film studies or Asu Aksoy and Robins in television studies. 22. See, e.g., Senders. For broader perspectives; see Barbieri; Brubaker. Yasemin Soysal posits a postnational model of civic membership, “the main thrust of which is that individual rights, historically defined on the basis of nationality, are increasingly codified into a different scheme that emphasizes universal personhood” (1998: 189; see also Sassen 1998; Jacobson). Rejecting nation- based models of citizenship and territorial models of denizenship, Soysal argues, “the incorporation of guestworkers...reveals a profound transformation in the institution of citizenship, both in its institutional logic and in the way it is legitimated” (191). Benhabib also discusses changing infrastructures of citizenship in Europe (2002b: 147–177). 23. “Sociologically, the practice and institution of ‘citizenship’ can be disaggregated into three components: collective identity, privileges of political membership, and social rights and claims” (162). Benhabib’s disaggregated theory of citizenship, which accounts for institutional and ethical tensions between national sovereignty and human rights in Europe, reflects this disaggregation of citizenship in social practice. Regarding the tense simultaneity of universalist and particularist claims, see Benhabib 2002b: 153; Soysal 2002: 142. According to Benhabib, recent political developments unsettle the philosophical category of citizenship (160). Considering the German past “with 2000 as its pivot rather than 1945,” Jarausch and Geyer observe, “for all the attention to exile and diasporas, the lengthy processes of cultural transformation involved in becoming or unbecoming ‘German’ still remain largely in the dark” (ix, 199). 24. See Leggewie for a related polemic (2000: 883). 25. Tarrow coins the term “rooted cosmopolitans” for his analysis of new forms of transnational activism (2002, 2005). 26. Sassen emphasizes corporate strategies, financial markets, legal infrastructures, and labor systems of globalization, whereas Soysal and Benhabib concentrate on systems of political membership in Europe. 27. As chapter one elaborates, I adapt technology of localization from Appadurai (1996: 180). 28. Benhabib engages in dialogue with Arendt and Taylor, from whom she borrows “ ‘web of narratives’ ” and adapts “ ‘webs of interlocution’ ” (7, 56). Benhabib otherwise faults Taylor for treating culture as analogous to language (55). 176 / notes 29. It also sets them apart from “postpositivist realism” (Mohanty 1993, 2003; Moya and Hames-García; see also Mohanty’s contributions

Load more