Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany

A book talk with author RUTH MANDEL, University College London, Anthropology, and discussant SUSAN OSSMAN, UC Riverside, Anthropology

In Cosmopolitan Anxieties, Ruth Mandel explores Germany’s relation to the more than two million Turkish immigrants and their descendants living within its borders. Based on her two decades of ethnographic research in Berlin, she argues that Germany’s reactions to the postwar Turkish diaspora have been charged, inconsistent, and resonant of past problematic encounters with a Jewish “other.” Mandel examines the tensions in Germany between race-based ideologies of blood and belonging on the one hand and ambitions of multicultural tolerance and cosmopolitanism on the other. She does so by juxtaposing the experiences of Turkish immigrants, Jews, and “ethnic Germans” in relation to issues including Islam, Germany’s Nazi past, and its radically altered position as a unified country in the post–Cold War era.

www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=978-0-8223-4193-2

Published: Friday, May 29, 2009

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