Women’s Liberation in Turkey Before the 1980s: The Case of Nezihe Kurtiz

A favorite argument for explaining the situation of women in Turkey is the one about emancipated but unliberated women published by Binnaz Toprak in 1982. Here, Toprak defended the idea that the legal reforms which were launched with the Westernization movement in 1923 emancipated women but could not liberate even the urban and educated ones. In 2000, this line of thought was extended to include the argument that women became both liberated and emancipated in the 1980s due to their feminist public and collective activism. While the former argument focuses more on the structures restricting women, the latter argument gives priority to women’s exercise of collective agency, while at the same time also giving some room for women’s individual agency. Here I will suggest that the idea of women’s liberation does not necessitate the exercise of collective agency, but can be understood and explained with reference to the agency of individual women alone. In other words, I will argue that any individual woman’s struggle for freedom and her achievements in her personal life should count as liberation, even though it does not translate itself to collective agency. To support this individual agency approach, I will use data from ten oral history interviews that I made with Nezihe Kurtiz, a woman of 90 years of age at the time of the interviews, and I will show that in exercising her own agency, Nezihe Kurtiz became both emancipated and liberated, and that this could take place in Turkey even before the 1980s

Crafting symbolic geographies in modern Turkey

Place is a social site of meaning and memory. The critical appreciation of place and its link to power in toponymic studies involve the identity politics of place naming. This paper discusses the relationship between the naming of places and identity construction in Turkey. First, conceptualized as a hegemonic practice, the Turkification of toponyms in the Kurdish region of the country is argued to be part of a broader system of assimilation. Supported by the imposition of particular ethno- nationalist narratives on the past, and conducted with concomitant processes of linguistic and demographic design, top-down and centralized engineering of the country’s toponymic order has two sides; the construction of symbolic Turkish spaces and the cultural erosion of Kurdishness. Later, the research examines the act of naming places as a Kurdish strategy of resistance and a cultural right. As an attempt to remove spatial and linguistic injustice, Kurdish toponymic practices aim at re-asserting the ‘self’ and reclaiming memory, space and identity through the re-introduction of former place names or new alternatives that are conducive to the reparation of the Kurdish identity. The discursive and material struggle over space and the clash between the Turkish and Kurdish discourses on naming places reflect the overall structure of social and political power relations in Turkey

Nationalism and Islam in Cold War Turkey

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Our current knowledge on the history of Turkish nationalism during the Cold War is a blend of facts and myths. One of those myths is the argument that the Turks developed a special relationship with Islam following their massive conversion in the eleventh century to the extent that religion has become the most important ingredient in Turkish national identity over time, even more pronounced than ethnic attributes. Secular visions of Turkish nationalism, on the other hand, which emphasize ethnic characteristics, are generally regarded as curious but unimportant exceptions. This article challenges that narrative and maintains that the alleged unimportance of secular nationalism is an invention of the late 1960s. It provides evidence that there was no consensus among Turkish nationalists on the question of Islam; on the contrary, the role of Islam in the making of Turkish identity was the most hotly debated topic among rival nationalist circles. It was not until the turning point in 1969 that a host of factors such as demographic change, anti-Kemalist and anti-RPP sentiments, and electoral behaviour in Cold War Turkey convinced Turkish nationalists to adopt a more Islamic-leaning discourse to be more successful at the ballot box. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis

Constructing Turkish “exceptionalism”: Discourses of liminality and hybridity in post-Cold War Turkish foreign policy

Cataloged from PDF version of article.This article examines the discursive practices that enable the construction of Turkish “exceptionalism.” It argues that in an attempt to play the mediator/peacemaker role as an emerging power, the Turkish elite construct an “exceptionalist” identity that portrays Turkey in a liminal state. This liminality and thus the “exceptionalist” identity it creates, is rooted in the hybridization of Turkey’s geographical and historical characteristics. The Turkish foreign policy elite make every effort to underscore Turkey’s geography as a meeting place of different continents. Historically, there has also been an ongoing campaign to depict Turkey’s past as “multicultural” and multi-civilizational. These constructions of identity however, run counter to the Kemalist nation-building project, which is based on “purity” in contrast to “hybridity” both in terms of historiography and practice

Tracing the Ottoman Legacy of Deficient Horizontal Relations in Turkish Civil Society

This paper attempts to supplement a literature concerned with Turkey‘s Ottoman legacy, especially as it pertains to the functioning of civil society in Turkey. It does so because the efficacy of civil society in Turkey is a major topic of discussion in light of its European Union accession bid, and Turkey‘s Ottoman legacy is yet to be comprehensively teased out. While the strong state tradition which is part of the Ottoman legacy is well documented, relations within society separate from the state‘s influence are yet to be subjected to an historical analysis. While the influence of the state on Turkish society is pervasive, and must be a component of any analysis of civil society in Turkey, analysis focusing on Turkey‘s strong state legacy has obscured other interesting facets of the country‘s Ottoman legacy. This paper posits that deficiencies in Turkish civil society are not just the result of the strong state tradition, but also reflect social attitudes that can be traced to a number of policies implemented in the late-Ottoman Empire

"Language, Aesthetics, and Ideology: Conceptual Frameworks for Turkish Literary Criticism"

This study attempts to investigate the salient features of Turkish literary criticism through deconstructing the concepts of language, aesthetics and ideology intersecting the disciplines of sociology and history. It questions the nationality of the self-evident category of "Turkish literature" exploring in what ways the Turkish Literary Criticism operates in relation to its aesthetics and ideology. While discussions on nationalism invite us to reconsider Turkish Literature vis-a-vis post-colonial framework, the limitations of this framework for the Turkish literary studies are put to contest. Instead of inserting theoretical standpoints to fit into Turkish Literary criticism, this paper elaborates on interrelated concepts to fashion a stratified literary critical framework