Abstract
This is a qualitative study which deals with identity as negotiated and articulated by youth born to Turkish parents in Germany. As part of a community of seven million descendants of immigrant ancestry, they are "trying to find their own place and identity on the cultural and ethnic map of Europe" (Liebkind 1989: 1). What calls for a common characterisation is their predicament of living between, to use Aziza-A’s term, "two fat cultures" (Watzinger-Tharp 2004: 291) – one of their family, the other of the host society. Many straddle in both, but belong to none. They are "a tree with leaves and branches but without roots" (Veteto- Conrad 1996: 28), with a ’culture’s in-between’ (Bhabha 2002), or an "imagined community" (Anderson 1991), blurring the boundaries, and experimenting with a blend, of civilizations.
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© 2012 VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
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Mehdi, A. (2012). Introduction. In: Strategies of Identity Formation. VS College. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-18681-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-18681-8_1
Publisher Name: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften
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