Diasporic cinema: turkish-german filmmakers with particular emphasis on generational differences

Accordingly, they not only occupy sub-state, sub-national, sub-cultural positions of social space, but have increasingly become more transnational – disturbing and reshaping the borderlines between local and global, calling the relevance of nation-states into question, and blurring the clear disjunctions between outsider and insider, migrant and host, other and self. “The diasporic public spheres are no longer small, marginal or exceptional. They are part of the cultural dynamic of urban life in most countries and continents” (Appadurai 2003a: 10). In addition, if states can be envisaged “not as things but as processes with effects, and not as monolithic but as full of varied interests, gaps and inconsistencies” (Harney and Baldassar 2007: 196), it becomes arguable that nation-states are not necessarily threatened by diasporic communities within national borders; by contrast, they are formed, reshaped and redefined by these transnational actors. One might, then, suggests a more inclusive understanding of nation and nation-state founded on the ever more visible heterogeneity of imagined communities. In this context, diasporic subjects define the new sociocultural space in European capitals and major cities, which is a site of fresh encounters, which is in constant flow; they create the “ethnoscapes” of contemporary Europe.

Here, Arjun Appadurai’s seminal work Modernity at Large provides a useful lens through which the shifting landscapes of Europe can be examined. He draws our attention to five dimensions of the global cultural flows that determine the new global cultural economy: 1) ethnoscapes, 2) mediascapes, 3) technoscapes, 4) financescapes, and 5) ideoscapes. They are all interrelated and shaped by individual agents. Their equal importance notwithstanding, I would like to focus on three of them, inasmuch as they better inform our understanding of contemporary diasporas. Ethnoscape refers to the landscape of persons “who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees … and other moving groups and individuals … appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (Appadurai 2003a: 33). Hereby, the fluidity and instability of communities and the susceptible dynamics of the relationship between them is underlined. Continuous negation and permeability of fixed categories defines the character of ethnoscapes. “Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information … and to the images of the world created by these media”, and Appadurai argues, “they provide large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world” (2003a: 35). In other words, mediascapes help to create and then to consolidate transnational imagined communities. In doing so, mediascapes also play a considerable role in strengthening diasporic communities’ multiple allegiances and transnational, cross-cultural interactions. The changing characteristics of diasporas are strongly related to the impact of these globalised and advanced mediascapes. Finally, ideoscapes, combined with the two already mentioned, shape the construction of narratives, of identity politics and representation, and the regulation of the increasingly heterogeneous public sphere. “The fluidity of ideoscapes is complicated in particular by the growing diasporas of intellectuals who continuously inject new meaning-streams into the discourse of democracy in different parts of the world” (Appadurai 2003a: 37). Thus, diasporic subjects have the potential to resist prevalent ideoscapes as the ideological apparatuses of nation-states by actively participating in the construction of new narratives and alternative discourses based on their experiences and perspectives. Overall, these contemporary landscapes of ethnicity, media, technology, finance and ideology, coined and elaborated by Appadurai, offer a useful framework within which the transnational connections of the contemporary world, that is, more often than not, described via deterritorialisation and displacement, and the multicultural, multinational, multifocal affiliations of contemporary diasporas can be comprehended.

Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman attempts to define and make sense of the contemporary sociocultural and political condition through explicating it as the “liquid state” of modernity, with a particular emphasis on the changing relationship between time and space.¹ He observes that “thanks to its newly acquired flexibility and expansiveness, modern time has become, first and foremost, the weapon in the conquest of space” (2000: 9). In this respect, mobility, access to the means of transportation, freedom of movement and the resultant claim of space provide individuals with power. After all, “we are witnessing the revenge of nomadism over the principle of territoriality and settlement. In the fluid stage of modernity, the settled majority is ruled by the nomadic and extraterritorial elite” (Bauman 2000: 13). That is, the contemporary world privileges migrancy over sedentariness. Like liquids, contemporary nomads are endowed with an extraordinary mobility. One can readily object to such propositions as they seem to turn a blind eye to the injustices and real practices of the world, which is still controlled by nation-states with clearly demarcated and patrolled physical borders. Only the privileged and wealthy are actually enabled to enjoy the luxury of unlimited mobility, while underprivileged masses experience difficulties in crossing borders and are bound by cumbersome legal impediments. In fact, Bauman turns his conceptualisation of modernity as liquid towards a critique of modern society and capitalism, and further questions the deepening inequality under these newly developed power relations. His theory proves relevant to this dissertation in the sense that it draws attention to the increased movement of people, which has become the norm rather than exception, changing the structure and face of European cities. According to him, the conditions of liquid modernity render “the difficult art of living with difference” (Bauman 2000: 178) plausible. Bauman invites us to reconsider the idea of the unified nation in the light of the heterogeneous and diverse communities that constitute that nation. He also underscores the volatility of identity and belonging, which helps to explain the hybrid and complex nature of diasporic identities and identification processes. His work, therefore, assists us in conceiving the developmental trajectories of diasporic communities and the significant impact they have had on the sociocultural fabric of their host societies across Europe.