Abstract
Ayşe Parla’s book is titled with an oxymoron: Precarious Hope. It is an invitation to reflect with sophistication and depth on the meaning of being a migrant and a call to better appreciate the nuances and ambivalences that inhabit migrants’ worlds. In practice, Parla undertakes an ethnographic depiction of the lives of migrants (mostly female) who have come to Turkey from Bulgaria and can claim the status of soydaş (racial kin or migrant of Turkish origins): the author calls them “Bulgaristanli migrants” (translating as “from Bulgaria”). This book’s focus is even more specific, as it relates to Bulgaristanlis who came to Turkey in the 1990s and 2000s, at a time of more restrictive immigration policies compared to earlier generations of Bulgaristanlis. To tell these poignant stories, Parla offers the analytical concept of “hope” as a lens through which to make sense of Bulgaristanlis’ lived experience in Turkey, in particular as it relates to their interactions with Turkish authorities and institutions
One singular and important contribution of Parla’s analysis is her choice not to study the most vulnerable or most privileged migrants, but rather to look at migrants who find themselves in the middle of the socially constructed ladder of more or less desirable migrants. This choice is motivated not only by the fact that this middle category of migrants is often overlooked by scholars who feel compelled to study and assist the most vulnerable, but also by the specificities and meaningful ambiguities associated with the relatively privileged, precariously entitled migrants she studies. This focus in turn sheds a unique light on the legal and moral system that creates these categories and hierarchies, as well as on the ways in which migrants navigate this system. As such, Parla’s analysis also illuminates the broader range of migrants’ differentiated situations in Turkey.
Being in the middle of the “vulnerable to privileged” ladder is generative of hope. In this context, hope is both enabling and limiting because it is a highly complicated and multifaceted concept that is at once an “entitled hope, precarious hope, troubled hope and troubling hope” (177). Chapter by chapter, Parla takes us to explore the different facets of Bulgaristanlis’ hope. While hope can certainly be understood as a broad longing for a happier life, among Parla’s interlocutors, hope is often more specifically associated with the desire to regularize their status (the Bulgaristanlis coming throughout the 1990s and 2000s often came under a tourist visa that they overstayed). These regularizations will typically take the form of amnesties offered to Bulgaristanlis only and sometimes pave the way to Turkish citizenship. Accordingly, for Bulgaristanlis, hope is not desperate, not a “hope against the odds” (25), but rather a hope grounded in a reasonable expectation that eventually, regularization can happen. This entitled hope — to which other migrant groups do not have access — is rooted: in the role played by the status of soydaş within the definition of Turkish nationalism, in the easy access to citizenship that earlier generations of soydaş from Bulgaria enjoyed, and in the fairly regular cycles of amnesties that occurred over the last decades. This hope, however, is also precarious because there is no guarantee, or regularity, in these amnesties and because during the endless process of gathering paperwork and waiting in line, migrants are under the arbitrary whim (positive or negative) of police officers, employers, neighbors, and other groups. At the same time, this hope is troubled, as it is occurring in the background of memories of better lives in Bulgaria. Most interestingly, this hope is troubling because in contrast to other, less-privileged migrants, it highlights a hierarchy within vulnerabilities, an unequal access to hope, which feels humane and inappropriate at the same time.
Parla’s sublime and finely tuned discussion of the moral implications of Bulgaristanlis’ entitled and precarious hope is applicable to the study of similar migrants in different contexts across the world. Her analysis calls for further studies of the use of hope as a means of governmentality and for studies of the different ways in which migrants’ agency evolves in hybrid (both constrained and enabled) environments. Furthermore, Parla’s study raises questions about other migrant groups in Turkey, especially Syrians, who could present another case of precarious entitled hope and who combine obvious vulnerabilities and a (unstable) entitlement based on the state discourse of solidarity with Sunni Muslims and “Syrian brothers.”
Beyond these fascinating discussions, Precarious Hope includes other captivating and nuanced discussions of relevance to a host of different disciplines and research interests: on critical feminism in Turkey, on grounded post-Communist nostalgia, and on the implications of being both an ethnographer and an activist, among others.
The migrant condition is often too big to comprehend. Public, and even scholarly, representations of migration are often reductive. In contrast, Parla’s book offers a compelling account of a meaningful way to understand the multiple essence of what it means to be a Bulgaristanli in Turkey, with easily accessible insights to its idiosyncratic and universal implications. With Precarious Hope, the reader moves one step forward in her quest to comprehend the human condition of being a migrant.