Contesting immigrant voice in Istanbul: Mass media, verbal play, immigrant channels

This study analyzes mass media and intertextuality in the mediation of communities in a modern Turkish megalopolis. It focuses on a weekly television series and its differential reception by the general Turkish public and an immigrant community whose heritage and dialect are central aspects of the program. The series appropriates a narrative adaptation of “Fiddler on the Roof” to construct a nostalgic frame for imagining earlier Turkish village life. I examine lateral circulation of greeting and leave-taking formula from the weekly television series in the larger urban society, and argue that the choice of these for recirculation is motivated by the political and social polarization implicated in other contemporaneous greeting and leave-taking formula within general Turkish society. At the same time I document counter-recontextualizations of discourse fragments by immigrants in Istanbul who insist that they not be consigned to the distant past evoked by the series. The different meaning of the non-standard dialect for the television series and for the immigrant community – a central misunderstanding – motivates a series of public actions on the part of an immigrant association whose members use internet sites, newspaper editorials and televised annual musical performances to air carefully measured counter-claims regarding their Balkan heritage and their place within the larger Turkish society.