In this innovative and thought-provoking study, Kira Kosnick explores the landscape of Turkish-language broadcasting in Berlin. From twenty-four-hour radio broadcasting in Turkish to programming on Germany’s national public broadcasting and local public access channels, Germany’s largest immigrant minority has made its presence felt in German media. Satellite dishes have appeared in migrant neighborhoods all over the city, giving viewers access to Kurdish channels and broadcasts from Turkey.
Kosnick draws on interviews with producers, her own participation in production work, and analysis of programs to elaborate a new approach to “migrant media” in relation to the larger cultural and political spaces through which immigrant life is imagined and created.
In this innovative and thought-provoking study, Kira Kosnick explores the landscape of Turkish-language broadcasting in Berlin. From twenty-four-hour radio broadcasting in Turkish to programming on Germany’s national public broadcasting and local public access channels, Germany’s largest immigrant minority has made its presence felt in German media. Satellite dishes have appeared in migrant neighborhoods all over the city, giving viewers access to Kurdish channels and broadcasts from Turkey.
Kosnick draws on interviews with producers, her own participation in production work, and analysis of programs to elaborate a new approach to “migrant media” in relation to the larger cultural and political spaces through which immigrant life is imagined and created.
Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin
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Overview
In this innovative and thought-provoking study, Kira Kosnick explores the landscape of Turkish-language broadcasting in Berlin. From twenty-four-hour radio broadcasting in Turkish to programming on Germany’s national public broadcasting and local public access channels, Germany’s largest immigrant minority has made its presence felt in German media. Satellite dishes have appeared in migrant neighborhoods all over the city, giving viewers access to Kurdish channels and broadcasts from Turkey.
Kosnick draws on interviews with producers, her own participation in production work, and analysis of programs to elaborate a new approach to “migrant media” in relation to the larger cultural and political spaces through which immigrant life is imagined and created.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253027795 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | New Anthropologies of Europe |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 254 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Kira Kosnick is Junior Professor of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
Read an Excerpt
Migrant Media
Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin
By Kira Kosnick
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2007 Kira KosnickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02779-5
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
It was hot on a late summer evening in Berlin in 1994. The living room windows of Deniz and Zerdi's apartment were wide open, facing a busy street in the western district of Schöneberg. The kids had just gone to bed, after an hour of exchanging banter with me in English at their parents' request. The English lesson was over, and we were to move on to the Turkish part, with me as the student. Yet, Deniz and Zerdi, both in their early 30s, were firmly placed in front of the television, channel-zapping as they tried to catch news on the Kurdish rally that had taken place earlier that day in Frankfurt. They had wanted to go, but could not leave their newspaper store, where they worked long hours six days a week. Deniz got lucky with the German public service channel ARD, which briefly covered the rally in its evening news program. The report stated that 15,000 people had attended the rally from all over Germany. Deniz exclaimed, "Not true — there were twice as many!" Zerdi told me that they had heard about the numbers who attended the rally from relatives who had participated. "But television always lies," Deniz said, adding that "the Turkish channels are fascist anyhow, and the only place where you can get the truth is the Kurdish programs on the Open Channel." There were lots of programs produced by migrants from Turkey on Berlin's open access television channel, they told me, and some of their friends were broadcasting there as well.
At that time, the summer of 1994, Berlin was teeming with migrant media projects that used television to proclaim their own truths and speak for different kinds of constituencies. These projects broadcast against the grain of large network television stations in both Germany and Turkey. Five years later, Berlin became the first city outside of Turkey to have its own twenty-four-hour Turkish radio station. Satellite dishes have appeared in migrant neighborhoods all over the city, providing access to television channels from Turkey, but also to transnational Kurdish channels broadcasting from Western Europe. Yet, local migrant media production has continued unabated. This book explores the reasons for the vitality of Berlin's Turkish-language broadcasting landscape, and migrants' efforts to represent their lives with a difference.
Migrant Media
The movement of people and the flow of mediated cultural representations across nation-state boundaries are key features of globalization processes in the contemporary world. At no point in human history have there been more people on the move, experiencing new forms of liminality and transience, but also creating new patterns of settlement and diversity. At the same time, we are witnessing an unprecedented increase in media production and circulation on a global scale, incorporating new technological developments and reaching out to increasingly dispersed audiences.
At a time when cross-border migratory movements render social formations across the globe increasingly diverse and culturally complex, the politics of representing such diversity and complexity take on growing importance. Mass media such as radio and television constitute central public technologies and arenas in which cultural representations are formed, contested, and disseminated. In a historical period that is marked by increasing engagement with such media on a worldwide scale, and through the integration of these media into "new media" circuits (Bolter and Grusin 1999), the question of access to such technologies and arenas is of ever more urgent cultural and political consequences. Developments such as the emergence of transnational media conglomerates, increasing commercialization, and concentration of ownership threaten to limit such access and result in mass media monopolies of ideas (Bagdikian 2004; McChesney and Schiller 2003). However, media landscapes have also diversified, with new social groups gaining access to media production. New technologies help these groups to articulate positions that are marginalized or entirely absent from dominant mass media circuits.
Migrant media form part of this diversification of media production, albeit a largely unacknowledged one (Husband 2005). Immigrant populations across the world contribute to transnational and diasporic audiences, and are often deliberately targeted by cross-border media as members of deterritorialized national or religious imagined communities. But migrants also engage in media production themselves, addressing not just fellow migrants but wider audiences that participate in national as well as transnational public spheres. Such media production is rarely backed up by financial resources or state interests that would allow for the emergence of prominent media ventures. Instead, migrant media tend to flourish in the marginal and often unstable spaces opened up by the erosion of public service and state broadcasting monopolies, by the development of new communication technologies, and by the uncertainties of political regulation that often still characterize new transnational media infrastructures.
Marginal as it might be, migrant media activism is nevertheless politically central when it comes to debating issues of democratic empowerment and minority participation in immigration countries. These are key issues in Western European nation-states at the beginning of the twenty-first century, where fears over the alienation of Muslim migrant populations in particular and the alleged failure of integration policies dominate political agendas. While the curbing of immigration and the containment of dissent might be the primary objective of these agendas, immigrant groups across Western Europe have become increasingly vocal in their demands for greater participation and empowerment. Migrant media activism is an obvious starting point to look for such "voices," and to try to understand both their emergence and reach.
Just twenty years ago, migrant populations in Western Europe had little or no access to media offerings that targeted them as audiences, and even less representation in the mass media. Nowadays, particularly in metropolitan centers such as London, Paris, and Berlin, locally produced radio and television programs target migrants in a variety of languages and complement cross-border satellite imports. Often small in scale, migrant broad-casting production appears to exemplify the democratizing potential of new media technologies and infrastructures and contributes to a "pluralization" of voices in mass-mediated public spheres. Migrant and ethnic minority media production is increasingly being discovered as a crucial resource for collective agency and self-representation in European social formations and beyond (Busch 2004; Cottle 2000; Silverstone and Georgiou 2005).
While migrant populations have begun to make use of new mass media opportunities in many Western European countries, this appearance has nowhere been more pronounced than in Germany. Turkish-language media production is thriving, particularly in the capital city of Berlin, which is home to the largest Turkish population outside of Turkey. Berlin's largest group of immigrants is served by a twenty-four-hour Turkish television channel and a twenty-four-hour Turkish radio station, by a wide range of open-access television programs broadcast in Turkish, by Germany's only radio station with an explicitly "multicultural" orientation, and by several small commercial television projects that share a cable frequency. All of these radio and television programs are produced in Berlin for immigrant audiences, and thus have a "local" character. They complement, and at times deliberately compete with, the mass media imports from Turkey that became available all over Germany via satellite and cable during the 1990s. The multitude of local programming also manages to compete with German mainstream radio and television, indicating that migrant media thrive in niches that major state-supported or commercial media players have failed to occupy.
Radio and particularly television, despite the advance of "second media age" technologies such as the Internet (Poster 1995), far outrank all other options as the mass media of choice for migrants from Turkey in Germany. Even though daily newspapers from Turkey are available across German newsstands in regions with immigrant populations, their circulation numbers are low. Efforts to establish print publications aimed at Turkish readers in Germany have almost all been doomed to failure. Print media cannot compete with the vibrant arenas of Turkish-language radio and television broadcasting.
This book presents an in-depth study of Turkish-language radio and television production in Berlin, based on ethnographic research that I carried out in the city between 1998 and 2003. Prompted by my curiosity at Berlin's thriving and at times politically explosive migrant broadcasting landscape, I set out to investigate the vexing dilemmas of minority representation in "multicultural" and transnational contexts that — as will be shown — go far beyond the urban space of Berlin. I have been concerned with the cultural practices of (self-)representation that migrants from Turkey engage in, and with the political struggles over who can authoritatively "speak for" an immigrant population whose presence in Germany is still highly contested.
The grounds for such contestation have shifted historically since the beginnings of labor migration in the 1960s. Initially, both citizenship laws and dominant imaginaries of the German nation had made the integration and naturalization of labor migrants neither desirable nor conceivable. But in the early twenty-first century, long-term immigrants are encouraged to take on German citizenship, and their social and cultural integration is high on the political agenda as never before. As will be discussed in more detail below, migrants from Turkey constitute not only the largest ethnic minority population in the country but also the one that is considered most difficult to integrate. German policy debates across the political spectrum and national tabloid headlines concur in their views that the overwhelmingly Muslim immigrant group constitutes a problematic minority in both cultural and religious terms. The explicit encouragement of naturalization has in a sense made the project of incorporating migrants more precarious, since any developments among immigrants that run contrary to integrative aims now indicate trouble at the very heart of German society, and not just at its margins. And these troubles are amplified in the context of the European Union, in which the search for a common cultural core goes hand in hand with concerns over the compatibility of Islam with "Western civilization."
This explains why the topic of Turkish migrant media is politically explosive in German integration debates: while some positions see migrant media activism as a form of public engagement and democratic participation that signals integration, others regard it as potentially and uncontrollably promoting segregation, undemocratic values, and religious fanaticism. Just how different are "the Turks," and how different do they want to be? Should migrants be allowed to "speak for themselves," and what do they have to say?
The investigation of immigrant representation in electronic mass media contexts inevitably raises issues concerning the relationships among categorical identities, cultural production, and power. Categorical identities that classify human collectivities along ethnic or religious lines are never just innocent labels for objectively existing groups. They are mobilized to legitimate group claims, and to ascribe differential worth to those categorized as different. Categorical identities justify both exclusionary and integrationist practices and defend differential rights to belonging, particularly when it comes to national communities (Williams 1989). In Germany, categorical identities, such as "Turkish," figure as central signifiers of essentialized cultural, ethnic, and religious difference.
Dominant cultural classifications have powerful consequences for the forms of exclusion and inclusion that prevail in ethnically and religiously diverse countries. In turn, these forms shape the opportunities for engaging in the politics of cultural (self-)representation. Defined as Germans' stereo-typical "Other," Turkish cultural production in Germany is forced to be continuously concerned with transforming, challenging, or confirming migrant identity labels. Since such labels and the meanings they carry have palpable consequences, affecting laws, policies, and everyday interactions, migrants cannot afford to ignore them. Yet, the power to objectify, to produce cultural classifications and to intervene in public discourses of cultural identity is unevenly distributed among minority and majority groups, and is a highly political issue (Werbner 1997). Who can "speak for" whom, by what means, and who is listening or watching? Seen in this light, Turkish migrant radio and television broadcasting in Berlin has an important role to play in circulating representations that challenge the range of ethnic and religious stereotypes of migrants pervasive in dominant media discourses — not just in Germany, but also in Turkey. Migrant media are of prime importance as arenas for producing and circulating identity claims in order to intervene in the politics of representation.
Questions of media representation cannot be asked without considering the socioeconomic conditions under which mass media function as cultural technologies, political instruments, and profit-generating economic sectors. Analysts of media globalization have pointed out that increasing market concentration, multisectoral involvement, and transnational corporate engagement are strengthening the links between dominant political and economic interests. This in turn negatively affects both access to mass media and the production and availability of critical media contents, particularly when it comes to radio and television broadcasting (Leidinger 2003).
Migrant media practices run counter to this tendency, and examining them in detail can illuminate the conditions under which "alternative voices" can be represented in mass-mediated public spheres — voices that articulate critical forms of knowledge, contest hegemonic representations of reality, and offer different sources of identification and empowerment in a particular context. It is only by moving among production practices, producers' motivations, media contents, and the structural conditions of production that the points of convergence, determination, and conflict among the economic and the cultural dimensions of such "subaltern voices" can be explored. As of yet, few studies exist that link these different levels of analysis, combining a focus on the political economy of media production, and on data gathered during participant observation of production practices, with close semiotic analysis of media programs, interviews, and conversations with media producers, as well as with an investigation into the historicity of broadcasting by and for migrants. Such linkage is central, how-ever, for exploring the subversive potential of migrant media production and the dilemmas of representation that migrant producers cannot escape from. These dilemmas are tied to the wider contexts in which apparently local Turkish media production is embedded, contexts that have national as well as transnational dimensions. Migrant media engagement in Berlin cannot be fully made sense of unless the dominant cultural politics toward migrants and minorities in both Turkey and Germany are taken into account. Migrant media production unfolds at the intersection of two different national arenas, their discursive fields and political-cultural practices.
In the lives of Berlin's migrants from Turkey, and in the media representations they produce of themselves, their positioning as members of an ethnic and religious minority in Germany and their belonging to different groups within Turkey are simultaneously at issue. Just how this multiple implication in different hegemonic structures and ongoing state formation processes should best be navigated — for example, by claiming a local identity, the importance of national belonging, or by asserting the priority of diasporic affiliations — is a highly contested issue that motivates and structures migrant broadcasting practices. The landscape of broadcasting produced locally in Berlin is both strongly divided and stratified, with different constituencies making radically divergent claims regarding the proper representation of migrant life, and with different resources and discursive means at their disposal to do so.
Migrants from Turkey in Berlin
Turkish migration to Berlin goes back centuries, with Turkish-Ottoman elites establishing trade relations and training at educational institutions in the city (Greve and Çinar 1997). However, up until the 1960s, their presence was never a very prominent one. The fact that Berlin is now home to the largest population of migrants from Turkey anywhere in Europe is owed largely to a historical coincidence. Spurned by the strategic political interest of the Western Allies after World War II, the Federal Republic of Germany was experiencing a postwar economic boom, with labor power becoming a scarce resource. Workers were to be recruited from abroad, the so-called Gastarbeiter (guestworkers) — not just to sustain economic expansion, but also as a useful industrial "reserve army" that would keep union demands at bay (Nikolinakos 1973). Just as the West German government was about to sign a labor recruitment agreement with Turkey, following earlier agreements with Italy (1955), Spain (1960), and Greece (1960), the GDR cut off West Berlin from its surroundings by building the Berlin Wall. On August 13, 1961, the GDR closed all remaining border checkpoints through which thousands of people had been streaming to leave the socialist German state. Given the spatial distribution of workforce and industry in the city, West Berlin factories suddenly found themselves without employees, many of whom were stuck on the Eastern side of the wall. When a few months later the newly opened Istanbul branch of the West German Federal Employment Office began to recruit and send workers abroad, Berlin was a prime destination.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Migrant Media by Kira Kosnick. Copyright © 2007 Kira Kosnick. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. The History of Broadcasting for Migrants in Germany
3. Foreign Voices—Migrant Representation on Radio MultiKulti
4. The Gap between Culture and Cultures
5. Bringing the Nation Back In: Media Nationalism between Local and Transnational Articulations
6. Coping with "Extremism": Migrant Television Production on Berlin's Open Channel
7. Signifying with a Difference: Migrant Mediations in Local and Transnational Contexts
8. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
[D]irectly addresses a burgeoning field of inquiry concerned with multiculturalism in Europe and the formation of transnational public spheres. . . . [A] model of clarity and rigor in its arguments, and the case study material is presented in a sympathetic and engaging way.
This book makes an excellent contribution to existing scholarly literatures on media and migration in Europe [and also] helps to define a new subfield in the anthropology of media, which I might call 'migrant media' in comparison with the literature on 'indigenous media' from the 1980s and 1990s.