Description:

Alize Arıcan (Rutgers University) presents, "Transience and Blackness: West African Futures in Istanbul", a talk as part of the interdisciplinary series, “Reflections on Whiteness, Blackness, and Race in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey” Wednesday, May 25 @ 12p CT via Zoom. 

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“Soon, they won’t be here anyway!” As I accompanied West African migrants to negotiations with municipal and governmental officials to improve their material conditions, I became accustomed to hearing this refrain. After all, the officials assumed, West Africans could not possibly belong “here,” since they were transit migrants ultimately headed to Europe, with no future in Turkey. With a critical eye towards the political implications of transit migration, I thus ask: what can an attunement to the future tell us about anti-Blackness and Blackness in Istanbul? In this talk, we will follow a Ghanaian man, who I call Coach, to a municipal office, a wedding, and a home/restaurant. Led by Coach, we will see that the perceived absence of futurity attached to “transit migration” facilitates anti-Blackness and its nonrecognition. We will also see that West African communities defiantly stake claims to a future in Istanbul through everyday space-making and relationship-building. Overall, we will trace the future as a site of contestation around Black life, migration, and urban politics.

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on futurity, care, racialization, urban transformation, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. Her writing received awards from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, Middle East Studies Association, and the American Ethnological Society. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University.