“There Is an Istanbul That Belongs to Me”: Citizenship, Space, and Identity in the City

Abstract

The citizenship ideal of the Turkish republic has taken shape through the logics of alterity, defined by and through both a paradoxical understanding of Turkishness and the rise of Kurdish identity politics. Citizenship in Turkey represents an uneasy marriage between ethnic and civic conceptions of national identity and belonging. This article develops an analysis of citizenship and everyday spatial practice in Istanbul through the narratives produced in focus group discussions with Kurdish-identified, migrant women. Their stories explore how citizenship, as a hegemonic process that assembles identities, fixes power relations, and disciplines space, is encountered and contested through the spatial practices of everyday life, through what Michel de Certeau calls the tactics of “making do.” Viewing dominant discourses and practices of citizenship as techniques of spatial organization (“strategies,” in de Certeau's terms), this study focuses on how participants narrate their own spatial stories of resistance to and appropriation of dominant codings of “the citizen” and “the stranger” in the Turkish context. This analysis brings to the fore the ways in which focus group participants encounter discourses and practices that position them as strangers and citizens, their use of tactics of anonymity and strategies of identity as they traverse city spaces, and the moments in which they situate themselves as political subjects in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces in Istanbul, through the spatial enactment of the strategies of citizenship and the tactics of everyday life.