“Really, We Should Have Been Playing Saz in a Little Room”: “New Wave” Turkish Migrants, Performance, and Counterpathways of Incorporation in Berlin

Abstract

Drawing on extended fieldwork, I analyze the performative aesthetics that incorporate a New Wave Turkish public in Berlin. Asking how elite migrants perform publics, I theorize counterpathways of incorporation to understand how urban professional New Wave migrants are located through performance along a pathway of identity and belonging shaped by authoritarian populism, Turkish diasporic counterpublics, and the hegemonic Berlin public sphere. I argue that a performative “aesthetics of displacement” shaped by academic theory produces a New Wave Turkish pathway from Istanbul to Berlin that “counterincorporates” a New Wave Turkish public into the urban public sphere.