Dissertation Defence: Echoes of Belonging

Suzi Asa, supervised by Dr. Fiona P. McDonald & Dr. Jonathan Cinnamon, will defend their dissertation titled “Echoes of Belonging: Diasporic Stories of Meyhanes, Migratory Objects, and Queer Worlds of Turkey in The Netherlands” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies – Power, Conflict, and Ideas theme.

An abstract for Suzi Asa’s dissertation is included below.

Examinations are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Please email fiona.mcdonald@ubc.ca or jonathan.cinnamon@ubc.ca to receive the Zoom link for this exam.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how diasporic subjects from Turkey living in the Netherlands craft belonging through sensory, material, linguistic, and queer world-making practices. Based on arts-based ethnographic fieldwork with twelve interlocutors, the dissertation traces how meyhane (traditional sonic tavern) rituals of eating, drinking, singing, listening, toasting, and gathering travel across borders and are reworked in diasporic life. Rather than approaching migration as a linear movement from departure to arrival, the dissertation foregrounds migration as a recursive, fractured, and multi-temporal condition shaped by displacement, political violence, asylum, memory, and non-arrival.

Through cultural analysis, queer affect studies, sensory ethnography, and arts-based research, this interdisciplinary dissertation argues that diasporic belonging is not historically inherited, fixed, or guaranteed; it is sensorially negotiated, materially sustained, linguistically troubled, and collectively reimagined through practices of world-making. To do so, the dissertation develops two analytics: language and art. As part of the linguistic analytical framework, the Edge Glossary is central. These glossary entries are a field-derived method of affective translation. The entries that open each chapter are neither stable definitions, direct translations, nor supplementary glossary terms. They are relational and analytic anchors that emerged through interviews and sustained listening. The dissertation moves through three central Edge Entries: muhabbet (conversation), sofra (table-set-up), and şerefe (toasting). Muhabbet names more than conversation; it becomes a sensory and relational infrastructure through which taste, sound, tactility, atmosphere, silence, disclosure, and trust shape being together. Sofra is more than a table or meal setting; it becomes a material, ethical, and affective arrangement through which food, objects, bodies, care, gender, and class are held and negotiated. Şerefe, commonly translated as ‘cheers’, becomes a raised-glass gesture through which honour, shame, pleasure, and queer futurity are voiced, altered, or withheld. As part of the artistic analysis, drawing is central to the knowledge that emerged from object-elicitation. Recipe books, shawls, keys, transit cards, soap, dried peppers, cups, photographs, bottles, and other ordinary things become drawn constellations of interlocutors’ migration stories, gathering multiple places, routes, losses, and unfinished attachments across time.