E513 | Over the course its final decades, millions of Muslim immigrants, many of them refugees of war and Russian conquest, settled in the Ottoman Empire. Between a quarter and a third of people in Turkey today have ancestors who arrived with those migrations. Yet their history often stops short of capturing the personal experiences of such people, what was erased, and what they have sought to preserve. In this episode, we speak with sociologist Şölen Şanlı Vasquez about how to write a more empathetic history of migration in Turkey through the lens of the Circassian diaspora. For her, this history is not just the story of how people from the North Caucasus were expelled from one empire and settled in an another. It is also a personal story about continuity, rupture, and recovery within the families of immigrants across generations and continents. Through a conversation about her ongoing research project called "The Home Within," we explore the themes of family, gender, ethnicity, race, and erasure --- not only in Turkey --- but across contexts of migration and displacement in the US and elsewhere. And we also reflect on the importance of public history that makes these issues relevant and relatable to a wider audience.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/09/circassian.html

Şölen Şanlı Vasquez teaches sociology at the Santa Rosa Junior College. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in 2009 and her M.Sc. in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics in 2000. Her book "Women and Cultural Citizenship in Turkey: Mass Media and 'Woman's Voice' Television" has been published by I.B. Tauris in 2016. Her most recent research project, The Home Within, is a digital history project about the Circassian diaspora in Turkey.

Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

CREDITS

Episode No. 513
Release Date: 16 September 2021
Recording Location: San Francisco, CA / Charlottesville, VA
Sound production and transcript by Chris Gratien
Additional thanks to Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Christine Philliou, and Sam Dolbee
Music: Chad Crouch
Bibliography and images courtesy of Şölen Şanlı Vasquez available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/09/circassian.html

The Circassian Diaspora | Şölen Şanlı Vasquez

Ottoman History Podcast