‘Two homelands and none’ : belonging, alienation, and everyday citizenship with the expatriated Greeks of Turkey
Abstract
For the expatriated Greeks of Istanbul and Imbros – some of whom have Greek citizenship, some Turkish – citizenship is neither an irrelevance nor a panacea. Turkish citizenship provided limited protection for ethnic Greeks in Turkey, and Greek citizenship could only go so far to ease the burdens of their ultimate emigration to Greece. Moreover, their expressions of self and identity are altogether more complicated and malleable than the apparent fixity and dichotomousness of statism. Nevertheless, citizenship looms large in their experiences, in both pragmatic and affective dimensions. The acquisition, loss and performance of citizenship – even the very materiality of identity documents – are intimately connected to expatriate efforts to navigate the everyday experience of migration and belonging. Whilst the significance of citizenship thus goes far beyond mere words on an official document, these formal aspects of citizenship are nevertheless a part of, not something apart from, the lived experience of citizenship.
Citation
Halstead , H Y 2022 , ' ‘Two homelands and none’ : belonging, alienation, and everyday citizenship with the expatriated Greeks of Turkey ' , Journal of Migration History , vol. 8 , no. 3 , pp. 432–456 . https://doi.org/10.1163/23519924-08030005
Publication
Journal of Migration History
Status
Peer reviewed
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
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