Spaces of Displacement on the Island of Imbros/Gökçeada

Abstract

This article investigates spaces of displacement within the context of Imbros, employing it as a case study to provide a novel perspective on the global phenomenon of displacement. Imbros/Gökçeada is a Turkish island in the Aegean Archipelago, currently inhabited by Turkish citizens from the mainland plus an indigenous community known as Rums or Asia Minor Greeks—an ethnic group who have faced waves of systematic displacement from the island during the 20th century since the demise of the Ottoman Empire. While the displacement of Imbrian Rums intensified between the period 1963 and 1980, the island simultaneously began to accommodate a growing number of Turkish residents, most of whom were emplaced by the Turkish authorities into the state-built villages on Imbros. Since the late 1990s, however, a return movement of the displaced Rum community to Imbros has gradually emerged through the revitalization of several Rum rituals on the island. As a result of these multiple temporal and spatial layers of displacement witnessed on Imbros, the question of how to better understand the phenomenon of displacement arose. To that end, the concept of positionality is deployed as a lens through which to analyze the various phases and spaces of displacement as they have occurred on Imbros itself, and from this, I produce the observation that the spatial phenomenon of displacement on Imbros is actually an entanglement of displacement, emplacement, and return (re-emplacement).