Broken lines of Il/Legality and the reproduction of state sovereignty: the impact of visa policies on immigrants to Turkey from Bulgaria

After the granting of citizenship to the 300,000 Turkish migrants from Bulgaria in 1989, the Turkish state has proceeded to enact a series of visa regime changes concerning more recent migrants from Bulgaria, who, according to the most recent modification, are only allowed to stay for ninety days within any six month period. This paper argues that the arbitrariness sustained by Turkish immigration policies partakes, on the one hand, in more global trends to increase the vulnerability of the dispensable workforce required by neoliberal market economies and, on the other hand, the arbitrariness enhances the political power of the state within and outside of its borders. The temporary legalization of Bulgarian Turkish migrants in return for voting in the Bulgarian elections reveals that the state consolidates its transnational political power by drawing and redrawing the broken lines of legality/ illegality. Moreover we demonstrate not only the ways in which the migrant population from Bulgaria is managed but also the strategies deployed by the migrants themselves in the face of such sovereign acts

Hamlet after genocide: the haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and empirical fabulation

Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, and personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir, to show the legal, moral, and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother. I move beyond the usual designations of Tehlirian as mere political assassin or self-evident moral witness and consider him instead as an “empirical fabulist.” My coinage of the term empirical fabulation is animated by Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) call for “critical fabulation,” and my reading of Tehlirian as an empirical fabulist recognizes him as a genocide survivor who aspired for collective justice, a son haunted by his mother’s ghost, and a historical actor who gave a fabricated testimony that was nonetheless based on the empirical facts of genocide. This paper is an invitation to explore the political and ethical potential, and perhaps even the necessity, of fabulation in recounting acts of genocidal violence that strain or defy straightforward representation, especially in cases when the existing rule of law does not rise to the demands for justice.Published versio

Labor migration, ethnic kinship, and the conundrum of citizenship in Turkey

This paper explores the ambiguous purchase that claiming Turkish ethnicity has in Bulgarian Turkish migrants’ attempts to access formal and social citizenship. I suggest that despite the new Citizenship Law, which appears to eliminate ethnic privilege, the emphasis on Turkish ethnicity continues to play a significant role in the migrants’ attempts at inclusion. I seek to resolve this seeming tension between, on the one hand, the continuing significance of ‘Turkishness’ in migrants’ discursive claims, and, on the other hand, the failure of most of these claims to materialize in practice by addressing the question of social and economic capital. Although ethnic belonging continues to be an important facet of citizenship, social class makes a significant difference in determining who qualifies as a citizen and has access to social citizenship. I thus argue that we need to expand the current terms of the debate on the inclusiveness of citizenship in Turkey, which revolve around ‘denationalization’ and ‘postnationalism,’ to include questions of class-based exclusion

Longing, belonging, and locations of homeland among Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria

The framework of transnationalism has offered a sustained critique of dichotomous understandings of home and host country. Nevertheless, the recognition of immigrants’ embeddedness in more than one nation-state should not come at the expense of investigating the abiding grip that nation-states exert on the dislocation experience. Through an analysis of Bulgarian-Turkish return-migration, I argue in this paper why the framework of transnationalism, while recognizing dual attachments, has to remain attuned to the national contexts into (and out of) which migration occurs. In analyzing constructions of homeland among Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria, the tensions between the phenomenological experience of dislocation on the one hand, and the discursive formations of nationalism shape and limit those experiences on the other. This article analyzes transnationalism from an anthropological perspective and is based on eighteen months of field research conducted by the author

Property, dispossession and citizenship in Turkey, or, the history of the Gezi uprising starts in the Surp Hagop Armenian cemetery

This article focuses on the state confiscation of the Surp Hagop Armenian cemetery as more than just another fact about the famous 2013 protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul. In addition to coming to terms with the limits of the Gezi uprising in relation to its claims of inclusiveness, such a focus unravels the key tension between, on the one hand, progressive and left-wing calls to promote the allegedly equal, universal citizen in Turkey through protest movements and, on the other hand, the differential property regime on which the Turkish nation-state is founded, the denial of which continues to erode the possibility of equal citizenship. The article demonstrates how the systematic confiscation of Armenian property is normalized in everyday discourse and politics in Turkey in the service of the broader legal governance of minority difference