(Be)Longing through visual narrative: Mediation of (dis)affect and formation of politics through photographs and narratives of migration at DiasporaTürk

Mine Gencel Bek , Patricia Prieto Blanco

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Our article explores how diasporic journeys and identities are remembered and represented through the visual narratives of DiasporaTürk, a Turkish diasporic media presence consisting of a Twitter account, an Instagram page, and two books. These engagements revive past (dis)affects and highlight the contemporary relevance of nostalgia, sorrow and victimization as key themes in the migration experience of ‘guest-workers’ from Turkey. The evidentiary force of the index, inhabiting fictional characters while looking like factual and archival material, seems thus to both acknowledge and validate migrated ‘guest-workers’, who, as subaltern groups, have otherwise received little praise or recognition in Turkey or ‘host’ countries. At the same time, while converging past and present (dis)affects associated with Turkish migration, DiasporaTürk contributes to reaffirming the reduction and homogenization of official/normative collective memories of migration via concrete visibilities/presences and invisibilities/absences.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)709-727
    Number of pages19
    JournalInternational Journal of Cultural Studies
    Volume23
    Issue number5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 8 Aug 2020

    Bibliographical note

    This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

    Keywords

    • Memory
    • affective turn
    • Mediation
    • Migration
    • Photography
    • Social Media
    • memory
    • (dis)affect
    • Turkey
    • migration
    • mediation
    • social media
    • photography
    • visual narrative

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