Forging Diasporic Citizenship

Book excerpt: Around the world, a new kind of diasporic citizenship is appearing, especially among diasporic people such as German-born Berliners of Turkish origin. Drawing on interviews conducted over a fifteen-year period, Forging Diasporic Citizenship explores the dynamics of everyday life for these Ausländer (or “outsiders”). These people 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. In this work of narrative research, Gül Çalışkan explores the tensions between the experience of displacement and the politics of accommodation as the Ausländer make claims to citizenship, articulate the ways they are rooted, and seek to achieve recognition. Through examining the social encounters, life events, and everyday practices of these German-born Ausländer, Forging Diasporic Citizenship constructs a theoretically sophisticated, transnationally applicable hypothesis regarding the nature of modern citizenship and multiculturalism.