Interview #4: Francesco

Interview #3: Elya

Interview #2: Orhan

 Part 1

 Part 2

Interview #1 - Axel

Translating Pain - Madelaine Hron

Hron's critique in her article Perversely through Pain - Immigrants and Immigrants Suffering begins from the assumption that both in fictional and authentic narratives of migration, the theme of immigrant suffering is more often that not left out or minimized. From my little knowledge of migration literature, which is limited to the readings we did during the course and few articles I found on the internet, I have to agree with Hron that "in our age of multiculturalism and globalization, we prefer to extol the difference, hybridity, mobility of the nomadic, cosmopolitan hero, rather than fixate on the sufferings of the unhappy immigrant". 

Bhabha, Derrida, Said, Kaya (only to mention few), all talk about various aspects of the phenomenon of immigration, from third spaces and hybridity to hospitality via crossing boundaries and mingling cultures, from foreignness to statistics about the perception of self vis-à-vis Other, but I do not recall much insight of the "human", emotional side of leaving one's country and having to adjust and function in a new one... that is to say the pain/suffering/loneliness/frustration felt by the "hosted". Hron points out that most literature of immigration does not differentiate between kinds of foreigners - thus blatantly ignoring that a foreigner can be (a)an immigrant, (b)a refugee, (c)an exile and because of this difference different feelings are involved.  

On a sociological perspective there is a distinction between immigrants and refugees on the basis of voluntary and unvoluntary migration (Hron). The perspective that sees refugees as people forced to leave their homes and immigrants as people who had chosen to do so in seek of whatever better future they had in mind, attributes to the firsts a certain "right" to suffer while downplays and obscure the the position of the latter. Assuming that pain is a prerogative of refugees means ignoring that most hardships a refugee goes through when in the host country - a new language/culture/unfriendly people  -  are probably the same an immigrant experiences too.

But in any case, her stance is that no matter the generalization, the popular opinion underrates the immigrants' suffering in the first place.  Why so? The author suggests two reasons: first, apparently - and we should blame a whole literature about migration for the misleading message which brings- we do expect immigrants' lives to be poignant with suffering.  "Going through pain" looks like a fair price to pay for a new-comer to adapt and be accepted in a new country, it is part of the process. After all, even students who want to be accepted in certain University brotherhoods have to embark upon a whole series of unpleasing tests to demonstrate they deserve to "get in", one might think. 

Secondly, it is thought that whatever the suffering of the "immigrant" at home, it should disappear as soon as they set foot on the new soil, as if together with a residence permit they obtained some sorts of magic painkillers protecting them from the "hardships of the  adjustment" (p.4) and started a new comfortable life full of joy. 

I believe this assumption ignores the fact that the distress felt by the stranger is not only due to his/her own difficulty to deal with a new place, phase, faces and the longing for those left behind; I think partly it is brought by the projection of the locals on him/her, a projection which reminds him/her every day of his/her otherness: in other words, it is not only his/her own otherness to make the immigrant feel miserable, but also the many ways in which a society can "otherize" a stranger. I think this is what people call "reflexive mirroring". 

Of another opinion is Julia Kristeva ( harshly criticized by Hron), for whom alienation brings happiness, more precisely "extranged happiness". She sees foreignness as a liberatory state of being, a "privileged position" from which, thanks to the interaction with the Other, an individual can develop the sense of his/her own diversity and uniqueness. This is what is called the deconstruction of home and belonging.

Adorno goes further in claiming that "the highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home", perhaps implying (I am not sure) that when "at home", we are in a place where our identity is never challenged thus we cannot ever know for sure who we are, and this is no good.

Assuming this is what he really means, then home is the place of the ones-of-the-like, where there is no flow; it is static and never-changing. It's the place where we can comfortably make predictions, expect which things to happen, create a routine. Does he mean we are like robots at home? Like thousands of photocopies of the same lame identity? Actually, If self-awareness is generated through the interaction with otherness, I see why he feels discomfort towards a place in which one doesn't have the chance of questioning his/her one's own identity, in which one cannot become aware of him/herself entirely. In this sense, I partly agree with Kristeva's notion of "extranged happiness", which I rather would call more generally "extranged self-awareness".

I believe one chooses to leave home for several reasons. I might have left mine specifically in an attempt to find parts of myself which could only come forward thanks to the interaction with Otherness. I might.

There is much talk going on about the dangers of living in an environment of the people-of-the-like, like that our perception of ourself end up being based on other people's projections and ideas of us...or at least contaminated by these projections.

So I once more wonder: is the perception of ourselves accurate? Or is it contaminated and strengthened day by day by the opinions other people project on us? Are we manufactured selves?  How can we know? Perhaps what we think we are is, in fact,  what we want to be.  Perhaps what we want to be is a product of the common opinion of what is "worth being". And is "what we want to be/worth being" what "we would like to be" were we born somewhere else? Is identity a virgin component of us or is it contaminated the moment you inhale your first breathe? 

Then I had one more thought: Suppose you, as a child, leave home and move to another country/society different from the one of your nationality. Still your identity would not be "virgin". Sure it won't be contaminated by the standards of your own community, but it would be by those of the new community. Or take Third Culture Kids, their identity is not shaped by a single country, they are loose in the world, but still the ever-changing atmosphere, the airports, the sense of elusiveness shapes their identities somehow. 

So is it really possible for one to build an identity for oneself? I came to think that identity is a product of the environment around you and it has some components of your "intimate" nature too, but I am not sure in what proportions.

Maybe, for one who has spent much of his/her life in one single place, an interesting option to challenge oneself would be to get lost and start anew somewhere else, as a nobody, nameless, pastless, faultless. Embracing and cheerishing his/her own foreigness.

And of course, aware of the pain one might go through, s/he should read Kristeva, maybe the journey would be more conscious, thus more appreciated :-)

This is the last post I am writing for the course Cultures of Migration. Maybe I will write some more. Now we are all connected, so whenever someone posts we all receive notifications, and I like to think that one day, when I will post, some of you will receive an alert and read my blog again :-) 

Thank you very much for the time together and the discussions we had, they were a real opportunity to grow up and I am glad I was there with all of you.

Keep in touch!

Laura

P.S. Interested in the anxieties of the stranger, an in particular on the figure of the Almanci and his/her in-betweenness?  Find Ruth Mandel's Cosmopolitan Anxieties. 

It's quite something :)

Night time's delirious notes (which don't make much sense and of which I had absolutely forgotten in the morning)

INTRODUCTION: THE CONTEXT

My project focuses on multiculturalism, hybridity, crossing borders, both physically and metaphorically. It is a picture of foreignness of the here and now, a spaceless and timeless shot, an irriverent question: where is home. 

I always found it interesting to ask to the foreigners I met, after making sure they spent a reasonable amount of time far from their "worlds", stupid questions like "in what language do you think?". Thankfully, I never got to the point of asking (though I heard it many times) "in what language do you dream". How would I remember? I remember feelings in my dreams, words do not exist, they only, altogether, give flavor and mood to the dream, but I have no idea in what language I dream. Never did. 

This were the questions that I used to ask. After a while abroad (and here I feel Northern Exposure a lot) I began instead asking "Where is home for you?". I was still in the rejection phase of my re-entry, so I was convinced that for most people, once they go through the path of foreignness and they make it to the end, home became the host country, as if, after months, perhaps years, of struggling to integrate and to make locals acknowledge us as "one of them", the least one could do was to feel at home. It was the mean to an end and it was the ultimate end itself. 

Some more experience abroad deconstructed this first policy I had stuck to and made me see that foreignness is composed by different layers of consciousness. 

One does not necessarily choose between here and there. Between host country and home country. And still, does host country imply that you will always feel like a guest? And does home country mean home? The aim of my paper is to offer an additional insight in the phenomenon of belonging, and try to demonstrate that foreignness builds a spaceless and timeless space which blurs our eternal concepts of home and gives a brand new meaning to belonging. In doing so, it works on one's identity, keeping the core safe and depriving us of some external layers, and once naked, we rebuild ourselves and our identities and we become what we are here, now, today. Because we cannot say who we are if we do not look back at who we were. True, we cannot say who we are, but we can feel what we have become.

I. FOREIGNNESS VS HOME

Stating that there is such a thing as foreignness implies that there is something as a quintessential "foreignness" and "home-y". 

What is home? Why we feel "at home" when at home? Related to this: why being a foreigner is initially a hardship?

*CRAIG STORTI - THE ART OF COMING HOME

II. WHEN HOME DOES NO LONGER EQUATE WITH HOME-COUNTRY

*IN-BETWEENNESS 

*THIRD-SPACE

*COMMUNITY OF-THE-LIKE

FINAL PAPER PROPOSAL

“In a sense, it is the coming back, the return, 

which gives meaning to the going forth. 

For we really don’t know where we’ve been until we come back to where we were.

Only, where we were may not be as it was 

because of who we’ve become, 

which, after all, 

is why we left.” Northern Exposure

"When I got back, I found out that I was no longer a round peg in a round hole, but a square peg trying to fit a hole that didn't seem to be there at all" 

New Zealand aid worker

“I had the chance to live three times in London, and every time I felt like you know I was taking back from where I left. My person was enriched by the experience I had meanwhile… but my person was not the same person that lived in France or Italy… it was like going back to the Axel that lived in England. And that s why I feel like coming back home when I go to places I once lived cause in some ways my person goes back to the person I once was there.” Axel Polimanti - Hong Kong

When I first wrote about belonging, and specifically about in-betweenness (and I also titled my blog as such), I thought I was making up a new word. I even checked out in an on-line dictionary how to spell it correctly. At the time I did not know much about it, indeed I didn't know it is a phenomenon widely discussed in discourses of migration and transnationalism. The reason why I used it in my blog is that that was simply the way I felt, the way I had been feeling ever since I left England after my first experience abroad, five years ago. When I was "back home", back to the place were I was born and raised, and where, technically and theoretically, I belong, I used to define myself as an alien, an outcast, an outsider  And despite it harbors several people that look tremendously like me, how can I call a place home, if when I am there I feel like I was a foreigner?  How can I call it home, if when there and I speak my language I feel more of a stranger than when I am abroad and I communicate in language that I acquired years after acquiring my driving licence?

Nobody ever taught me about the tricks of the "coming back", the reverse culture-shock, about the difficulties of the re-entry, and, especially, no one ever told me that there is an entire scholarship out there about concepts such as "home and away" and "belonging". Thanks to the course I took in Culture of Migrations, I could finally detect and name each one of my feelings, each one of my demons. Besides, I have to say, my perspective has changed, slowly but irreversibly. 

I found out that in-betweenness is not the only one alternative to the feeling of being home. The consequences of migration are tremendously diverse, and so are the feelings emerging from it. There are factors such as third spaces, multiple identities, communities of-the-like... I am not sure that I would have been able to do discover all of this otherwise, and to grow up and expand my knowledge, and for this I need to thank my professor. 

Although, as I said, several scholars, writers, journalists have researched about notions of "home and away" and its implications before I did, I would like to give my contribution with a little research I did myself. In my final paper, I am going to explore the ways in which foreignness can dilute and re-shape one's identity. I begin here. In the first part of my paper I will take into consideration people who left their countries of nationality as young adults, and I will explore whether/how their perception of where they belong becomes nebulous. Once homesickness leaves room to enthusiasm and one settles to the paces and lifestyle of the new country, does their notion of "home" changes? Are they enriched by the new experience, or divided? Have their feelings of where they belong changed or they have remained the same? I argue that foreignness changes us irreversibly and that our notion of home changes after we adapt to a new place. I will then move on trying to provide a definition of "home" , intimately related to "belonging", and formulating hypothesis as to why our perception of where we belong changes over time and space.

With this in mind, and with the aim of reinforcing my arguments, I will refer to previous scholarship about the topic of migration and belonging. Particularly interesting at this regards are the essay "Home and Away" by Sarah Ahmed, "The Art of Coming home" by Craig Storti, some chapters from Michiel Baas' "Imagined Mobility: Migration and Transnationalism among Indian students in Australia", particularly ch. #1 "Departure, Migration, Transnationalism and what lies in-between", and ch.#3 "Learning how to work in-between". These texts together categorize different "places of belonging": In-betweenness / Third Dimensions (or Third Space) / Communities of foreigners, and so on.

Equally useful, I believe, will be to consider Lara Markova's essay "Mapping In-betweenness" and Hron's "Translating pain", about another layer of migrating: the suffering of the migrant. I will combine these arguments with the answer provided by diverse students (who have changed their countries of nationality for different reasons) in several video-interviews that I shot and that I will include in the bibliography.  

DRAFT OUTLINE FINAL PAPER PROPOSAL (temporary)

HOW BEING A FOREIGNER SHAPES ONE'S IDENTITY and ONE'S NOTION OF HOME

“In a sense, it is the coming back, the return, 
which gives meaning to the going forth. 
For we really don’t know where we’ve been until we come back to where we were.
Only, where we were may not be as it was 
because of who we’ve become, 
which, after all, 
is why we left.”

I *VIDEO INTERVIEWS*

II *WHERE IS HOME?*

After some years abroad, it can happen that the concept of home becomes blurred, or acquires multiple meanings.

Before asking where is home, it may be the case to ask "what is home for me?" 

* Sarah Ahmed --- Home and away 
* Craig Storti -- The Art of Coming Home

III *BELONGING*

*Possible resources*

Elif Shafak- The Saint of Incipient Insanities

Elif Shafak - Interview "Migrations"

Can Candan - Duvarlar

Many are those youngsters who have become foreigners for a choice. Say they enrolled to a university to acquire an education abroad. Say they found a job far from their home countries. Time goes by. Some adapt, some do not. 
Where do these people, after years abroad, belong?
Do they belong to their places of nationality or do they belong to the place where they moved to? Or to both? Or to an entity between them? Or to the world? Possible places of belonging:

III.1 Neither here or there: trapped in the space in-between 

<<Burda zaten yabancılık çekiyorsun, kötü olan Türkiye’ye gidiyorsun orda da yabancılık çekiyorsun. Hani şimdi nereye gidelim Marsa mı?>> C-It 

III.2 The concept of third-space (a rich, unique multifaceted identity )

(Amin Maalouf)

III.3 The "community of strangers" 
<<I don't belong to a country, I belong to people who share my values>>

IV *COMMENT ON THE VIDEO INTERVIEWS*

aka what I found out.

(2012) INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON TURKISH MIGRATION IN EUROPE - Projecting the next 50 years

Hello, I thought these videos might be interesting for someone's final project!

Dr. Franck Duvell's opening speech

Prof. Kemal Kirisi's speech 

Prof. Tariq Modood's speech

MIGRATION STUDIES VOL.1

Hello bloggers, look what I just found! 

 FREE PDF ISSUE OF "MIGRATION STUDIES"

What is it? 

"Migration Studies is an international refereed journal dedicated to advancing scholarly understanding of the determinants, processes and outcomes of human migration in all its manifestations. It furthers this aim by publishing original scholarship from around the world. Migration shapes human society and inspires ground-breaking research efforts across many different academic disciplines and policy areas. Migration Studies contributes to the consolidation of this field of scholarship, developing the core concepts that link different disciplinary perspectives on migration. To this end, the journal welcomes full-length articles, research notes, and reviews of books, films and other media from those working across the social sciences in all parts of the world. Priority is given to methodological, comparative and theoretical advances. The journal also publishes occasional special issues – a call for proposals will be announced in due course."

It is produced by the Migration Society (student-run) of the Oxford University.


Happy reading! :)

P.S. About undocumented migrants...

TIME FOR SOME AMAZON.COM RAIDING?

The 20 Best Young British Novelists

WANNA COME OVER FOR... A JOB?

What do you understand by "hospitality"? What bell makes it ring in your mind? 

When I think about it, I see someone, perhaps a small group of people looking happy to be visiting someone else. You might want to invite over some friends for an afternoon tea or for dinner. You might want to call them to show them the pictures of your holidays or your new cat or dog. And once they arrive, you try to make their time at your place as pleasing as possible, and to make them feel "at home".  

Reading Mireille Rosello's essay, "Postcolonial hospitality: the immigrant as guest" , I found out that when it comes to migration studies the word hospitality can describe a phenomenon other than what I had in mind:  It defines the relationship between a country and immigration to that country.  In this sense, concepts of hospitality, whose boundaries I thought I had clear in mind, become more complex. In other words, when hospitality becomes a "political position", which means state hospitality vis-a-vis individual hospitality,  the "discourse of right and discourse of generosity blur" (Rosello). The purpose of her paper is not so much to defend nor praise hospitality in this sense. Rather, while  analyzing and questioning the two faces of hospitality (the host and the guest) she tries to figure out the nature of hospitality and whether and how it should be redefined. 

Western countries tend to look at immigrants with both suspicion and aloofness. More often than not, an immigrant (the used-to-be-called sans-papiers-without documents- in France), is an unwelcome guest, is someone who came to our country because he needed something. Plus, he is the Other, that is, different, unpredictable, perhaps dangerous. For reasons burdened by an historical colonial legacy, there is an unwritten hierarchy within the geopolitical map of the world, which makes inhabitants of certain states feel superior to inhabitants of others: in the past because they "colonize" them, and in present times, because they happen to be richer, hence more powerful.  

Rosello takes the case of immigration in France, a state historically famous on the papers for its being "hospitable" to migrants. In the years after WWII, people from foreign French-speaking countries, like Algeria, were "invited over" in France (see "recruited") with the aim of gathering workforce who would build up areas on the French suburbs. It happened then that a flux of invited immigrants went to France, where they began working and living. On the one hand, France gave these people the chance of starting anew in a new country, with a job and accommodation, on the other the conditions under which these people were working were not desirable. If we look at both sides, we see that the concept of hospitality becomes nebulous: it implies that migrants-accepting countries authomatically put themselves in a more powerful position than the newcomers.  France did not simply open the gates and let foreigners walk in out of generosity; instead, the government was recruiting workforce. The big question then arises: should these immigrants feel grateful for the chance they were granted, or should they see France's hospitality as a mere fair "contract" , as in "I give to you, you give to me"? It could be argued that when a nation-state invites immigrants as workforce, this state is not really being "hospitable" : at the end of the day, who can really tell who needs who more ( we'll have a clearer idea about it after Barbara Harrel-Bond's lecture on Wednesday maybe) ? 

Besides, as Rosello explains, postwar migrants had to deal with illiteracy and "miserable" living conditions. This possibly made them even more aliens of what they were already. It must be said that the state tried to help the children of these immigrants in the 1980s, although without much success: they were still outcasts. Do you remember Doria in the novel "Kiffe kiffe tomorrow"? She and her mother live in a low-income suburb outside of Paris. After her father departs to Morocco in order to get re-married, the state sent a social counsellor who would go to their place and monitor their situation once per week. Also, Doria reports that, despite her unwillingness to give them any credit, some of her teachers looked and sounded friendly to her, they tried to be understanding and to help. 

However, despite the help granted by the state and despite she was obtaining an education, many other things made her stuck in the "alien bubble": just to mention few, her poverty, her clothes, the oil her mother Jasmine used to brush her hair with, which made them look greasy and "oriental". Perhaps, most of all, her unwillingness to adapt.

                                                                 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @

As Avril Bell points out in her article Being at home in the nation, notions of host, guest, home, arrival, hospitality in the field of migration are complex: 

What is the nature of this arrival? 

Are these guests invited andawaited or do they arrive unannounced? 

What do they want? 

Do they freely choose to come or are they in search of asylum? 

What hospitality does the host offer? What are the limits to that hospitality? 

How long are guests welcome to stay? 

What are to be their rights and obligations in relation to

the nation-space/homeland? 

Further, as they come from elsewhere, they are

clearly foreign and have a different culture of hospitality. How is the etiquette of the host–guest relation to be negotiated across cultural difference?

We might want to think about them. Reading the three last lines, I could not help but wondering: in our everyday lives, what makes someone a foreigner (hence  a guest) and what makes us more inclined to be good hosts? Again I wonder how much a passport can tell about one's identity in the first place, and if it has a real impact on the relationships between "foreigners" and locals. 

What I asked myself is (I am going to say "France" as a host country just to be consistent with Rosello's paper, but it could be everywhere else in a migrant-receiving country):

1) How we, human beings/ locals / youngsters, unconsciously define what is "foreigner"? I said unconsciously meaning that we do not virtually stick a stamp on their foreheads with a big F on it, but we might treat them and behave around them as they were carrying it. 

2) Do we treat the (a) second generation foreigner as a guest or as a French?

3) Do we treat the (b)adopted non-French kid raised by a French family as a guest or as a French?

I find it hard to answer to my questions. According to law, (a) and (b) are both French. However, we unconsciously catalogue as "foreign" everything that does not resemble our standard majority. It is non-foreign whatever we can recognize, people whose accent we cannot hear, who eat the food we eat, whose smell we cannot perceive because they smells like us. It is non-foreign anything which reactions and behaviours we can predict. In a nutshell, one-of-the-like is one who shares our cultures and values, and foreigner is one who does not.

With this in mind, reading my questions again, I would say that us people would feel comfortable treating like a local someone who was adopted by a local family - someone who, despite being born as a foreigner, spent enough of his/her developmental years (maybe most) in the host country. S/he speak the same language as us and her behavior is probably very predictable, because belongs to the range of behavior we are accustomed to and expect from one-of-the-like.  

From the same token, we would find a little harder to consider the second generation foreigner as a local. I realize this sounds simplistic and superficial. What I think, is that many are the factors which affect this individual's perception of him/herself and, consequentely, the others' perception of him/her. Admitting that it is not enough for someone to state one's identity for others to accept him/her as such, it is also true that in part your perception of yourself (hence your behavior), can affect the way people see you. Briefly: if, when in Rome, you do as the Romans do, easily you fill find people ready to welcome your and to make you one of them.

And, I have yet another example: I met once an Italian, born in Italy to an Austrian mother and Italian father, and who moved to Austria when he was very little. He could not really speak Italian. He was totally foreign to me. 

P.s From "La Haine": 
"Think about a young agent who beings his job full of good will: he doesn't last a month"
"Better than an Arab in a police station: he doesn't last one hour" (referred to Abdel) 
LOL

The Art of Coming Home - Craig Storti

“In a sense, it is the coming back, the return, 

which gives meaning to the going forth. 

 We really don’t know where we’ve been until we come back to where we were – 

only where we were may not be as it was 

because of who we’ve become, which, after all, 

 is why we left.” 

Northern Exposure

"I had to be hungry - starving! - they decided, so they took me to the restaurant first. "So, wild man, tell us about Africa, " they said, "were you living among savages or what?" 
Bush Pigs - Richard Dooling

"When I got back, I found out that I was no longer a round peg in a round hole, but a square peg trying to fit a hole that didn't seem to be there at all" 
New Zealand aid worker

"My advice about 'coming' home? Don't." 
Japanese businessman

HOW MUCH YOUR ETHNICITY MATTERS (IN MIGRANT STUDIES)?

This week we talk about ethnicity and migration, and more specifically about how certain scholars find annoying and inaccurate the dominant role of ethnicity in studies about migration. This is the first time that I write a response using data and statistics, it is just an attempt and you might find it awful, but please bear with me :)

The articles we will take into consideration are three: 

- Nina Glick Schiller, ''Beyond methodological ethnicity''

- Levent Sosyal, ''Beyond Second Generation''

- İbrahim Sirkeci, ''Migration from Turkey to Germany''.

Nina Glick Schiller's article raises a criticism towards the conventional ethnic-approach used to find out about the degree of integration of a migrant into a locality and the relationship of the migrants to their homelands. According to Schiller, an approach which takes ethnicity as the sole unit of analysis is inaccurate because ethnicity is not the only factor affecting one's integration (or non-integration) in the place of settlement, on the contrary both the place of departure and the place of settlement play a role.  

Furthermore, it  does not take into account ''the increasing fragmentation of ethnic groups in terms of language, place of origin, legal status, and stratification'', which matter as well. To better understand her point, try to think about the coexistence in Turkey of both Turks and Kurds, that the conventional ethnic approach would consider as one single unit (Turks).  

Her suggestion for a more accurate study is to take into account different, non-ethnic transnational factors which too constitute identity, such as ''familial, religious, economic, occupational, class, political, social, and locally based networks of interaction''. When such different variables are taken into consideration, in İbrahim Sirkeci we see that gender and region are the factors that have the biggest impact on migration (in gender terms, females seem to be more prone to migrate and in regional terms Kurds turned out to be more likely to migrate than Turks.)
 

A criticism similar to Schiller's is made by Portes (in Levent Sosyal). Portes laments that the ethnical approach ''groups the youths under pan ethnic labels, thus obscuring the characted and implications of the data'', and also like Schiller he suggests that analyzing ''the economic conditions, family arrangements, ethnic and racial identities, self-esteem, social capital, language competency and labor market achievement of the second generation is more appropriate'' than a method that does not separate ''place, ethnicity and culture''.

Likewise Sosyal -- firmly against the scholarship that identifies the first generation of migrants with ''the past'', the second generation with an uncomfortable state of ''neither here nor there'',the third generation with ''modernity'' -- argues that it is not where they come from that will predict whether migrants will integrate or not, but where they are at:  the place where migrants build their lives day by day.

He argues that Berlin, for example, with 12% of is population made up by foreigners (4% Turks), is a city in which diversity flourishes. Foreigners can swing among a great variety of intercultural youth clubs and express their rich and complex identities. In other words, in such invigorating environment, a foreigner ceases to be only a foreigner and takes other determinants: foreign student, foreign worker, foreign writer, foreign unemployed, foreign feminist, just to mention some possibilities. In places of settlement of the like, second generations migrants (regardless of their ethnicity) more than being stuck between borders, are free to walk beyond them, more than being alone, they are all one, and rather than living nowhere, they inhabit the now, here. 

In the movie ''Kebab connections'', the main character Ibo is a good example of second generation migrant who is well integrated in the place of settlement (his uncle has a restaurant and he creates commercials for it), but parental relationships still affect to some extent his actions. Think about when his German girlfriend Titzi finds out to be pregnant: Ibo's father is not so much alarmed because of the pregnancy out of the wedlock, but rather because of her Germanness. Here we can argue that ''home'' is initially synonim for ''darkness'' (I say ''initially'' because in the end we have the redemption and ''happily ever after''), while Germany and Titzi symbolize modernity and brightness. Do you agree? To what extent?  And do you agree with the Turkish stereotype the movie offers?