Generations at the Mirror: First and Second Generation of Turkish Consumers’ Home Country Nostalgia

Migrants, as well as their children, typically live in a ‘hyperethnicized’ world. Institutional pressures coming from the outside— the dominant society as well as the ethnic communities (Zouaghi and Darpy’s ‘ideal us’; 2006)—and even from internal confrontations with family members—for example, across generations (Visconti and Napolitano 2009)—constantly reinvigorate the ethnic discourse. Hence, migrants are not allowed to overcome their often presumed ethnic diversity, and the way they behave and consume is permanently interpreted in the light of such (self)attributed difference. Elif, a Turkish second generation living in Lille, voices this institutional hurdle: “Look, have you seen how Turkish people are represented by French television? Think of what integration means. Are we willing to integrate by watching this stuff? No! We do on our own...” Elaborating upon Benedict Anderson’s (1983) idea of ‘imagined community’, we claim that ethnic discourses produced by institutional agents represent powerful imagined communities, invisible as much as immanent in the life of migrants and indigenous people. This idea complies with Jenkins’ (2002) analysis of the ‘imagined’ but not the ‘imaginary’ nature of ethnicity. As Jenkins observes, ethnicity is constructed within an institutional scenario—thus, it represents its agents’ ‘imagination’—but its invisibility and immateriality do not make it ‘imaginary’, that is, without social consequences for the people producing and embodying that imagination. In a nutshell, fostered by increased mediatisation and connectivity, imagination appears today as a form of ‘organized social practice’ (Appadurai 1990/2011).