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1. Amy Mills, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance and National Identity in Istanbul

Author:
Sibel Bozdogan
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Insight Turkey
Institution:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
Recent neoliberal/post-Kemalist shifts in Turkish culture and politics have ushered in, among other things, a rekindled interest in Istanbul’s cosmopolitan past and in the remaining vestiges of its historical urban fabric. While an increasingly sophisticated culture industry is mobilized to recast the former as an object of nostalgia for popular consumption, gentrification projects are transforming the social landscape of historical neighborhoods in new and often controversial ways. Amy Mills’s ethnographic study of Kuzguncuk offers a compelling account of these processes at work in a picturesque neighborhood on the Asian shores of the Bosporus, widely accepted to be the paradigm of multi-ethnic coexistence, neighborliness and aesthetic charm in a city that has lost most of these qualities to republican urban/social modernization during the latter half of the 20th century. As Mills uncovers in six thematic chapters, this image of Kuzguncuk as the idealized mahalle—as the embodiment of belonging and familiarity as well as ethnic/religious harmony and tolerance—in fact obscures deeper histories of discrimination, conflict and violence that went hand in hand with nationalism, “Turkification” and successive episodes of migration. “Nostalgia constitutes the flip side of silence”, writes Mills (p. 210), and Streets of Memory makes a convincing case of how cosmopolitan nostalgia, along with its silences, ultimately bolsters the very same Turkish nationalist narrative that it claims to contest.
Political Geography:
Istanbul

2. Rifat Bali, Turkey in the 1960's and 1970's Through the Reports of American Diplomats

Author:
Tanel Demirel
Publication Date:
07-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Insight Turkey
Institution:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
Rıfat N. Bali has done us a great service by publishing reports of American diplomats about Turkey in the 1960's and 1970's. The book consists of 35 reports and cables prepared by American consulates in Istanbul, Adana Izmir, and the American Embassy in Ankara. Bali has organized the classified reports into five categories: the “political and social situation in Turkey,” “the situation after the May 27, 1960 Coup,” “the Turkish general staffs ultimatum of March 12, 1971,” “the Kurdish issue” and finally reports concerning minorities. It should be noted here that these reports did not exactly represent the views of the US government, but the views of serving American diplomats. Failure to distinguish between these two categories might lead to unwarranted conclusions.
Political Geography:
Turkey and Istanbul

3. Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely, The Museum of Innocence

Author:
Michael McGaha
Publication Date:
03-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Insight Turkey
Institution:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
One of the most distinctive things about Orhan Pamuk's writing is the playful way he tantalizes his readers by constantly blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction. By having his first-person narrators include many well-known aspects of the novelist's own life in their tales, he keeps us guessing about which parts of the story actually happened and which are imaginary. When he published his first few novels, only people who were personally acquainted with the author or his family could participate in this guessing game. As he has become increasingly famous—and especially since the publication of his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City—many more of his loyal readers have been drawn in. Not only have his parents, his brother, his grandmother, and even the family servants become familiar figures, but fictional characters from his early novels, such as the wealthy merchant Cevdet Bey and the newspaper columnist Celal Salik turn up with such regularity in later works that they have come to seem equally real. With The Museum of Innocence Pamuk has taken this game to another level. The cover of the novel features a photo of four people parked beside the Bosphorus in a 1956 Chevrolet just like the one described in the novel as belonging to the protagonist's father; two of those people are easily recognizable as Pamuk's parents. A note on the dust jacket attributes the photo to “Ahmet Isikci.” Attentive readers will remember Ahmet as the character personifying the young Orhan Pamuk in his first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons.Even weirder is the fact that beginning next summer, if all goes according to plan, you will actually be able to visit the museum supposedly created by Kemal Basmacı, the protagonist of The Museum of Innocence, as a monument to his lost love, Füsun Keskin. That museum will contain many mementoes of Orhan Pamuk's own childhood and youth, such as his tricycle, as well as 4,213 cigarette butts allegedly smoked by Füsun, and many other, equally fascinating objects, such as the ceramic dog that once reposed on a doily on top of her parents' television set. I'm sure you'll agree that this is well worth the price of admission, but if you take your copy of The Museum of Innocence with you, you will get in free.
Political Geography:
Istanbul