Forging Diasporic Citizenship

Forging Diasporic Citizenship explores the dynamics of everyday life for German-born Berliners of Turkish origin. These Ausländer (or “outsiders”) are obliged to define themselves by their Otherness, but it is their relatedness to German society that transgresses traditional concepts of both German and Turkish identity. By examining the social encounters, life stories, and everyday practices of these Ausländer, this transnationally applicable work serves to disrupt delimited notions of citizenship. It shows how diasporic people are creating a broader basis for identity, community, and social responsibility that transcends the scope of membership in a nation-state.

""Forging Diasporic Citizenship" explores the dynamics of everyday life for German-born Berliners of Turkish origin. These Auslèander (or "outsiders") are obliged to define themselves by their otherness, but it is their relatedness to German society that transgresses traditional concepts of both German and Turkish identity. By examining the social encounters, life stories, and everyday practices of these Auslèander, this transnationally applicable work serves to disrupt delimited notions of citizenship. It shows how diasporic people are creating a broader basis for identity, community, and social responsibility that transcends the scope of membership in a nation-state."--

Forging Diasporic Citizenship explores the dynamics of everyday life for German-born Berliners of Turkish origin. These Ausländer (or “outsiders”) are obliged to define themselves by their Otherness, but it is their relatedness to German society that transgresses traditional concepts of both German and Turkish identity. By examining the social encounters, life stories, and everyday practices of these Ausländer, this transnationally applicable work serves to disrupt delimited notions of citizenship. It shows how diasporic people are creating a broader basis for identity, community, and social responsibility that transcends the scope of membership in a nation-state.

This collection of papers discusses the impact of diasporas on the articulations and practices of legal, political, cultural and social citizenship in their country of origin. While the majority of current citizenship debates focus on the challenges and directions in which diasporic and migrant communities impact on the citizenship regime in their country of settlement, the papers in this volume approach the study of citizenship from the perspective of the link between the sending state and its diasporic communities abroad. The papers discuss the role of language, religion, kinship, and other ethnic markers in diaspora politics and trace their implications for the articulations and practices of citizenship. Through discussing cases across political and geographical spectrums, and from different historical epochs the book broadens and enriches the debate on citizenship by demonstrating important ways in which diasporas impact on the delineation of citizenship regimes and the politics of national identity in their homeland. This links to the continued use of language as an ethnic marker, but also one which may be learned, allowing a certain degree of choice and shifting affiliations amongst putative members of a diaspora. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

This book briefly delineates the history of the Haitian diaspora in the United States in the nineteenth century, but it primarily concerns itself with the contemporary period and more specifically with the diasporic enclave in New York City. It uses a critical transnational perspective to convey the adaptation of the immigrants in American society and the border-crossing practices they engage in as they maintain their relations with the homeland. It further reproblematizes and reconceptualizes the notion of diasporic citizenship so as to take stock of the newer facets of the globalization process.

Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to U.S. imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. In Forging Diaspora, Frank

Forging Ties, Forging Passports is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. Mays considers the shifting notions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship through the stories of individual women, men, and families who navigated these transitions in their everyday lives, as well as through the paperwork they carried. In the aftermath of World War I and the Mexican Revolution, migrants traversed new layers of bureaucracy and authority amid shifting political regimes as they crossed and were crossed by borders. Ottoman Sephardi migrants in Mexico resisted unequivocal classification as either Ottoman expatriates or Mexicans through their links to the Sephardi diaspora in formerly Ottoman lands, France, Cuba, and the United States. By making use of commercial and familial networks, these Sephardi migrants maintained a geographic and social mobility that challenged the physical borders of the state and the conceptual boundaries of the nation.