The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism.

• Author: Pekar, Cigdem

By Ozlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, 224 pages, $27.88, ISBN: 9780812252156

What are the values and meanings of U.S. citizenship in an increasingly global world? In their award-winning book The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism, Ozlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta aim to explore this major question while focusing on the Turkish case. The authors analyze different "meanings and values" that various actors who all reside in Turkiye and possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship attribute to U.S. citizenship (p. 2). Several interconnected questions are also raised in the book such as "What does being a U.S. citizen signify outside the U.S. in contexts shaped by a history of its global power?", "What transnational values and meanings can be assigned to national citizenship regimes?" and "What do these meanings and ideals indicate for how we perceive American power in particular and citizenship, in general, today?" (p. 169). To answer these questions the authors' research is based on in-depth interviews with three groups of people over the course of 2012 and 2013 that were all residing in Turkiye. The first group is composed of parents who obtained U.S. citizenship for their children by giving birth in the U.S. The second group is Turkish citizens who have chosen to return to and live in Turkiye after obtaining green cards and U.S. citizenship through naturalization. The third group is U.S. citizens who were born in the U.S. but have settled in Turkiye as adults.

The chapters of the book interactively flow into the next as three groups of people residing in Turkiye exploring experiences with imaginaries of and perceptions of the status of American citizenship. In the first chapter titled "Imagining America in Turkey: A Historical Overview" the authors trace how American citizenship has become a "coveted status" by examining the evolution of American-Turkish relations over the last 150 years (p. 35). It examines how America's growth in global political, social, and cultural influence has been filtered via the internal dynamics of Turkiye and has resulted in today's various definitions of America in Turkiye. "Imagining U.S. Citizenship: Risk Societies and Calculating Mothers" the second chapter of the book, discusses the process by which Turkish individuals living in Turkiye give birth in the U.S. for their children to get U.S. citizenship. Chapter 3...