Transnationalism, Migration and the Challenge to Europe by Kevin Robins Asu Aksoy

Author:Kevin Robins, Asu Aksoy [Kevin Robins, Asu Aksoy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781317338604
Google: 5rPMCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-23T02:49:34+00:00

Migrants tend to forget that exaggeration is an integral part of television rhetoric in Turkey, and it is only when they go back for a visit that they recognise the discrepancy between screen reality and street reality (whereas viewers in Turkey are checking out this discrepancy on a continuous basis). We may say that the decontextualisation of the migrant viewing situation often results in a kind of interference in the reception of cultural signals from Turkey.

A further consequence of the dislocated context of consumption is that migrant viewers can never be in a position to watch Turkish television naïvely or innocently. We must be aware that they actually operate in and across two cultural spaces (at least) – Turkish and British. As well as watching Turkish channels, most of them are very familiar with British television. And they will often make comparisons between the two broadcasting cultures (concerning, for example, programme quality, scheduling, bias, censorship). We may say that there is a constant implicit comparison going on, and very often the comparisons are explicit – Turkish programmes are always watched and thought about with an awareness of British television in mind. As one man put it to us, ‘we have the opportunity to compare things we see with what happens here. Before, we didn't know what it was like here’ (Focus group, London, 16 December 1999). When we say that Turkish migrants cannot watch Turkish television innocently, we mean that they can no longer watch it from the inside, as it were. They cannot recover the simple perspective of monocultural (national) vision. They are compelled to think about Turkish culture in the light of other cultural experiences and possibilities.

We have said that watching transnational Turkish television can be a frustrating and often disillusioning experience. What we want to add in conclusion is that this disillusionment can also be a productive experience. Through their engagement with Turkish (alongside British) media culture, Turkish migrants develop a comparative and critical attitude, and may become more reflexively aware of the arbitrariness and provisionality of cultural orders. In the present argument, we have been principally concerned with how the ordinary world of broadcast television can work to undermine the diasporic imagination. What should also have become apparent in the course of our argument, however, is the potential that exists, too, for working against the grain of the national imagination, against the confining mentality of imagined community.

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