A welcome addition to the burgeoning anthropological literature on Turkey, Precarious Hope by Ayşe Parla is a vigorously researched and compellingly written ethnographic study of the post-1990s Bulgarian Turkish labor migration. Complicating the easy distinctions between economic and political migrants, Bulgarian Turkish (Bulgaristanlı) migrants—who are European Union passport holders—go against the grain of conventional migration paths: they leave Europe to work as undocumented laborers in Turkey. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in both Turkey and Bulgaria, the book offers a portrait of these “unconventional” migrants. It examines how their identities and sense of belonging, their social and spatial mobilities, and their gendered subjectivities are constituted in and through encounters with the police and state institutions, as well as encounters with Turkey's labor, citizenship, and migration regimes. Bridging Middle Eastern and Slavic and East European studies, the book makes important contributions to scholarly debates over migration, bureaucracy, precarity, and affect and emotions.
In the wake of the Syrian civil war, Turkey has come to host more refugees than any other country in the world, and the country's migration regime has become a subject of increasing academic interest. In a move away from the figure of the suffering refugee that saturates the media and academic scholarship, Precarious Hope invites the reader to look at Turkey's migration laws and bureaucracy from the vantage point of a relatively privileged group of migrants who identify ethnically as Turkish. As such, this group of migrants can tap into the ethnoracial underpinnings of the state and its laws by mobilizing ethnic kinship idioms and claiming common national belonging. This work ably uses the concept of hope to explore how Bulgaristanlı migrants navigate ethnic privilege and economic and legal vulnerability in the murky zone between legality and illegality. In so doing, the book provides a theoretically sound framework and a stimulating ethnographic case study to consider hope and belonging in relation to privilege and precarity.
Like the other Turkish-speaking Muslim minorities from the Balkans, Bulgarian Turkish migrants have long enjoyed a special status in the eyes of the Turkish nation-state. For example, in response to the totalitarian and violently assimilative policies of the Bulgarian state towards its Muslim minorities in the 1980s, Turkey opened its borders and formally granted citizenship to Bulgarian Turkish migrants. Unlike the earlier generation of migrants in the 1980s, Parla's interlocutors are not guaranteed automatic citizenship, yet they still benefit from favorable discretionary treatment in both formal and informal legal spheres. In fact, Bulgaristanlı migrants are not only hopeful of, but also feel entitled to, legalization because of their claims to ethnonational belonging. This is in stark contrast to other migrants, for whom the road to citizenship is often closed because Turkey only accepts as immigrants individuals with “Turkish race/lineage” and “ties to Turkish culture.”
Bulgaristanlı migrants’ hopes for legalization and citizenship—which are incited and buttressed by the ethnoracial formations of Turkish belonging, citizenship, and nationalism—are a form of what Parla calls “entitled hope”: hopes that can be taken for granted by certain groups. Building on the insights of Marxist cultural theory and the anthropology of emotions, Parla conceptualizes hope not as an inner state that resides in individuals but as a “collective structure of feeling.” She then examines its historical, legal, and political production and finds that Bulgaristanlı migrants’ hopes are entitled, but they are also precarious because Bulgaristanlı migrants are not fully secure in their legal, economic, or cultural belonging. In addition to their status as members of a flexible and disposable migrant workforce, they often face cultural disapproval and stigmatization in relation to their perceived lacks and excesses. They are branded as too secular and nostalgically attached to communism, and as not religious enough. As such, they must walk a thin line so as not to be seen as violating the gendered codes of morality, modesty, and honor that get negotiated through culinary habits, mixed-gender socialization, and the public behavior of women. The book's beautiful title, “Precarious Hope,” precisely captures the perpetual interplay of privilege and precarity that drives the formation of Bulgaristanlı migrants’ hopes for citizenship and a better future, on the one hand, as well of their nostalgic yearning for the communist past, on the other.
Among the book's many contributions to emergent fields in Middle East studies, two in particular should be highlighted. The first concerns the role of race and racialization in our understanding of power, identity, and social inequality. Race is often omitted from Middle East studies scholarship as an analytical category, sometimes to the detriment of racialized groups in the region. Precarious Hope enters into a productive dialogue with insights from critical race theory, laying bare the ways in which ideas and ideologies about race infect and inflect law and state ideology and the everyday practices of labor, violence, and belonging.
Although the book centers on Bulgarian Turkish migrants by and large, Parla also draws on her long-term activist work with migrants from different racial and national backgrounds to demonstrate how precariousness, just like hope, is differentially distributed across race, class, gender, and nationality among migrant populations. Especially evocative are her discussions of the murder of the Nigerian refugee Festus Okey while he was in police custody and of the gendered violence targeting non-Turkish female migrants. Following up on her now classical piece on politics of honor (“The ‘Honor’ of the State,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 [2001]: 65-88), Parla especially expands on gender and sexual violence in relation to processes of racialization. She explores how Bulgarian Turkish female migrants occupy a privileged and relatively safe niche in domestic work, while others who work in informal textile ateliers, such as African female migrants, are construed as sex workers and routinely exposed to sexual violence.
How will the Turkish government's politically contentious decision to grant citizenship to one hundred thousand Syrian refugees affect the ethnonational citizenship regime described in the book? Although Parla addresses this only briefly in a footnote and hints at possible answers, the book nevertheless provides a compelling theoretical scaffold for thinking about historically contingent nexuses of privilege and precariousness, which will no doubt aid other scholars of migration who might delve into this question.
The book's second critical contribution concerns its investigation of the role that affects and emotions play in shaping and mediating the ways in which people relate to macro-level sociopolitical structures and transformations. Middle East studies scholarship is no stranger to this field, which examines the expressive genres, poetics, and politics of emotion and is epitomized by the rich anthropological literature on honor and shame. Precarious Hope builds on this tradition and critically extends it through Parla's conceptualization of hope as not simply an individual feeling but a collective structure of feeling that animates common forms of being and becoming. In her account, hope emerges as the affective interface between the law and the subject, the individual body and the body politic, and the ordinary and the crisis. The uneven production and distribution of hope is crucial to governance and to the different ways in which various social groups relate to state power and invest in imagined communities. To make her arguments, Parla surveys the Western philosophical genealogy of hope at various points throughout the book; scholars working on feelings may find this work very useful, unless they are specifically interested only in the Islamicate genealogies and culturally specific repertoires of hope.
A remarkable section of this work is Parla's articulation, in Chapter 2, of a succinct but powerful methodological critique of certain versions of affect theory, which has become an influential approach to the study of emotions. She offers a sharp critique of the conception of affect as a prediscursive impersonal intensity that is radically distinct and qualitatively different from emotion, understood as subjectivized feeling and narrativized experience. This critique is a candidate for becoming a classical reading in the anthropology of emotions/affect, with the potential for impact well beyond the scope of Middle East studies.
All in all, Precarious Hope is an indispensable text for scholars working and teaching on Turkey, migration, refugees, citizenship, emotions, the informal economy, and race and ethnicity in the Middle East.
