On Intergenerational Refugee Identity

Abstract This chapter explores the key shaping components of refugee identity among Asia Minor refugees and their descendants. Refugee identity is not a static and ahistorical concept, and thus its underpinnings are traced across a long historical process from the Ottoman past to modern day. In this process, memories and identities are shaped and reshaped across different historical periods for ‘related “age groups” embedded in a historical-social process’, as Mannheim aptly defined generations. This chapter analyses the defining elements of refugee identity—religion, language, culture, and memory of trauma—for different generational units and traces the continuities, discontinuities, and shifts of different generations’ sense of identity in changing historical periods. In order to illuminate this process, oral testimonies of Asia Minor refugees (oral history archive) are linked to oral testimonies of their descendants (conducted interviews), providing a complex intergenerational account of the continuities and discontinuities of refugee identity.