Ayşe Parla

Ayşe Parla’s first book, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey, explores the tension between ethnic privilege and economic precarity through a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with Turkish migrants from Bulgaria as they navigate legal and bureaucratic spheres, as well as the complexities of cultural belonging. The broader theoretical intervention is a rethinking of hope, not as an unequivocal good beyond critique, but, inspired by thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Terry Eagleton and poets such as Yeats and Dickinson, as having an ambivalent nature: she argue sthat hope can enable or disable, inspire or obscure, depending on its context, object, and justifications. Her current book manuscript combines biographical cultural history, literary criticism, historical anthropology, and ethnography to examine the art of living as a Verabrogh (survivor) in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and within the postgenocidal landscape of Istanbul/Bolis through close readings of the memoirs of four public intellectuals and writers.