Becoming Blind to the Landscape: Turkification and the Precarious National Future in Occupied Istanbul
This article analyzes the making of particular political topics as yasak (taboo or forbidden). It argues for understanding the yasak not as a product of state censorship, but as a local, urban cultural process, and is based on a study of representations of urban culture and politics in a humor gazet...
| Veröffentlicht in: | Transition. - Indiana University Press, 1957. - 5(2018), 2, Seite 99-117 |
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| Format: | Online-Aufsatz |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2018
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| Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk: | Transition |
| Schlagworte: | Political science Law Behavioral sciences Social sciences |
| Zusammenfassung: | This article analyzes the making of particular political topics as yasak (taboo or forbidden). It argues for understanding the yasak not as a product of state censorship, but as a local, urban cultural process, and is based on a study of representations of urban culture and politics in a humor gazette called Diken (Thorn) published immediately after the First World War, when Istanbul was occupied by Allied forces and the Ottoman Empire was in the last phases of losing its territories to Europe. Humor gazettes (mizah) have long played a central role in Turkish politics and were the primary popular platform from which to debate the causes and futures of Istanbul's lost status as the Ottoman imperial capital. Their rhetorical strategies include reference to common places and people in stories that "illuminate" the "truths" behind Istanbul's (and Turkey's, more generally) political and cultural crises. Two of the most important developments during and after the war were economic Turkification, the violent transfer of wealth and property from non-Muslim minorities (especially Armenians) to Turks, and the emergence of a Turkish nouveau riche who benefited from wartime profiteering. Although new and ill-gotten wealth was dramatically and abundantly visible in the urban landscape, the sources of this wealth became a taboo topic. Istanbulite Turks learned how not to see (and eventually forget) the sources of postwar Turkish urban wealth by turning it into an open secret: known but not acknowledged. The postwar period is an especially rich moment for examining the making of open secrets because it occurs before the foundation of the Turkish Republic and thus the more obvious role of the modern state in authoring nationalist narratives of history that silence minority experiences. |
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| ISSN: | 15278042 |