Portraits of Unbelonging Photographic Journeys Across Borders

"With ethical sensitivity and clear storytelling, Zeynep Gürsel thoughtfully reflects on unbelonging and reintroduces human presence to images, lives, families, and futures once altered by a legal system aimed at enforced erasure. Compelling and emotionally impactful."-Bedross Der Matossian, author of The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century

"In this stunning book, Zeynep Gürsel intricately traces the connections between photography and expatriation, and between citizenship and transborder mobility. Written with care and shaped by a commitment to 'looking together' at an array of documents with the descendants of these early migrants, Portraits of Unbelonging repairs to wholeness scattered and fragmented histories. A methodological and conceptual tour de force." -Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, author of Pathways to Syrian California

"A luminous and stunning work. The reader accompanies the author on a journey that unfolds as a brilliant and moving meditation on photography, citizenship, and belonging." -Leti Volpp, coeditor of Legal Borderlands: Law and American Borders

"This brilliant book of photographic history is simultaneously a consummate act of scholarship and of repair. Zeynep Gürsel unfolds, image by image, the multiplicity of their concrete effects-and underlines the instability of citizenship, the power of family photographs, and the duration of longing for a home in a world of migration now even more 'at sea.'"-Laura Wexler, author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism