The City of Collective Melancholy: Revisiting Pamuk’s Istanbul

This essay looks back upon Orhan Pamuk’s non-fiction book, Istanbul: Memories of a City (2003), and unpacks its multi-layered representation of the city as landscape. It is here that Pamuk pursues most overtly “the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city” which won him the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. Weaving personal memoir and historical essay into a unique narrative tapestry, Pamuk’s book explores a series of tensions that define the city’s image and identity; insider/outsider and East/West polarities, in particular, are tirelessly deconstructed. The essay examines Pamuk’s poetics and politics of memory in relation to works by other authors, notably Walter Benjamin. In conclusion, the new edition of Istanbul (2015) is discussed against the background of the social and spatial changes that have beset Turkey’s cultural capital in the interim

Three Routes to Autocratic Rule: Market Reforms, Politics, and Masculinist Performance in the Making of Right-Wing Regimes

How do the economy, right-wing legacies, and personal style shape today’s autocracies? Analysts have commented that especially three contemporary autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, and Rodrigo Duterte—have similar styles, motivations, or bases of support. Yet, this paper will show that the paths that took them to their thrones are quite distinct. Neoliberalization had disorganized society in Turkey, India, and the Philippines. The rule of “strongmen,” in response, showed the way out of this disorganization. The main divergence, however, is that Erdoğanism introduced statism and mass organization as against the disorganizing thrust of neoliberalization. Modi parallels Erdoğan in the civic paramilitary aspects of rule, but not in statism. Other than a weak infrastructure thrust, Duterte did not make the economy into a central issue in the way Erdoğan and Modi did. Moreover, he did not deploy civic activism at all. These three routes have thoroughly shaped and differentiated the autocrats’ styles too, even though all involve a heavy resort to masculinity. Coming from a thick tradition of mass politics and moving in a state-capitalist direction, Erdoğan’s performance incorporates women’s civic mobilization and heavily emphasizes fertility and productivity. Shorn of such anchors and bedeviled by a fragmented polity, Duterte’s rule sexualizes violence rather than production. Modi’s celibate masculinity is similar to Erdoğan’s in its dramatization of size and production but downplays reproduction, except for deepening the ethnic divide his party relies on. These differences have culminated in hegemonic autocracy in Turkey, ethnic autocracy in India, and oligarchic autocracy in the Philippines

Transforming everyday life: Islamism and social movement theory

The Islamist movement in Turkey bases its mobilization strategy on transforming everyday practices. Public challenges against the state do not form a central part of its repertoire. New Social Movement theory provides some tools for analyzing such an unconventional strategic choice. However, as Islamist mobilization also seeks to reshape the state in the long run, New Social Movement theory (with its focus on culture and society and its relative neglect of the state) needs to be complemented by more institutional analyses. A hegemonic account of mobilization, which incorporates tools from theories of everyday life and identity-formation, as well as from state-centered approaches, is offered as a way to grasp the complexity of Islamism

Political articulation: parties and the constitution of cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey

Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of parties in forging critical social blocs in three separate cases, India, Turkey, and the United States, offering a critique of the dominant approach to party politics that tends to underplay the autonomous role of parties in explaining the preferences, social cleavages, or epochal socioeconomic transformations of a given community. Our thesis, drawing on the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau, is that parties perform crucial articulating functions in the creation and reproduction of social cleavages. Our comparative analysis of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress parties in India will demonstrate how “political articulation” has naturalized class, ethnic, religious, and racial formations as a basis of social division and hegemony. Our conclusion is that the process of articulation must be brought to the center of political sociology, simultaneously encompassing the study of social movements and structural change, which have constituted the orienting poles of the discipline