Longing, belonging, and locations of homeland among Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria

Abstract

The framework of transnationalism has offered a sustained critique of dichotomous understandings of home and host country. Nevertheless, the recognition of immigrants’ embeddedness in more than one nation-state should not come at the expense of investigating the abiding grip that nation-states exert on the dislocation experience. Through an analysis of Bulgarian-Turkish return-migration, I argue in this paper why the framework of transnationalism, while recognizing dual attachments, has to remain attuned to the national contexts into (and out of) which migration occurs. In analyzing constructions of homeland among Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria, the tensions between the phenomenological experience of dislocation on the one hand, and the discursive formations of nationalism shape and limit those experiences on the other. This article analyzes transnationalism from an anthropological perspective and is based on eighteen months of field research conducted by the author.