Academic literature on the topic 'Collective memory – Turkey'

Based on precedent theories on collective memory and urban studies, this article develops a framework of approach to contemporary urban collective memory. Understanding urban collective memory by handling people and urban space as a system provides a sociospatial perspective for critical approaches to cities. The study initially provides overviews of theoretical approaches to collective memory and city, and then puts forth constituents of urban collective memory. Based on these constituents, contemporary urban collective memory is discussed, and a framework for analyzing contemporary cities in terms of urban space and urban experience is introduced. For a clear portrayal of urban issues within the context, the introduced framework is devised through the case of Ankara, the capital city of Turkey and the inspiring force behind this study. This framework aims to present a ground to assess people’s relation to urban spaces in the contemporary era.

Monuments, schools, hospitals and named streets, parks or squares that are mutually constructed in big cities as examples of historical and cultural values are places of common memory in Turkey and Pakistan. Accurate understanding of the collective past and historical consciousness affects not only the present, but also the shaping of the future. Therefore, cultural phenomena such as tradition, language, and religion, national and religious holidays in the collective past of a society contribute to the formation of historical consciousness and national identity. The memory places, which play an important role in the construction of the common future through the cultural values of the Pakistani and Turkish societies, also reflect the socio-political and cultural memory objects of both societies. In this study, memory spaces that play an active role in the cultural interaction between Pakistan and Turkey will be discussed with the theory of memory space (lieu de mèmoire) of French historian Pierre Nora. In addition, how and what memory spaces that reflect the identity of a society symbolize in terms of both symbolic and historical reality will be examined.

Increasing immigration activities due to globalized economies, political conflicts, wars and disasters of the recent years not only had a serious impact on the tangible heritage fabric, but also on the intangible values of heritage sites. With the challenges of managing drastic changes the field of heritage is faced with in mind, this paper proposes a documentation strategy that utilizes “collective memory” as a tool for risk mitigation of culturally diverse sites. Intangible and tangible values of two cases studies, from Turkey and Canada, are studied in a comparative way to create a methodology for the use of collected data on “collective memory and identity” in risk mitigation and managing change as a living value of the site.

The childhood memories of most Turkish citizens are full of images of national holiday celebrations. Loudly recited heroic poems, enthusiastic folk dance performances, costume parades and school shows, anxious teachers, and involuntary laughter during the long, silent moments of commemoration-all are part of these images. A few years ago (in 1998), Turkey celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic, giving us an opportunity to rethink these remembrances as both collective and personal experiences, with all their political and social implications. As in any other country with a state-controlled educational system, the structure of these celebrations had been well established and consolidated over the years, having “an accumulative effect upon successive generations” (Ben-Amos 1994, p. 54). The formalism and the overemphasized nationalism of the celebrations, repeated over and over for years, eventually created a sense of alienation. Nevertheless, when the Islamist Welfare Party assumed power over the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara in 1994, the revival of the national holiday celebrations was remarkable. Thus began a new approach to celebrating national holidays, with rock concerts, extensive TV coverage, and public interviews. The seventh-fifth anniversary celebrations further revived the national holidays, with contributions from state as well as nongovernmental organizations. After the Welfare Party's assumption of power, the celebration of national holidays symbolized support for the Republic's reforms and secularism, in opposition to rising Islamic fundamentalism.

This article explores the spatialization of a collective memory in Turkey’s north coast city of Samsun. In 1919, Mustafa Kemal Paşa’s first step onto the Bandırma, the steamer that carried him from the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to Samsun, was also the first step of the Turkish struggle for independence. The dock that led him to the city and the hotel that accommodated him were also thus slated to be narrated as representational spaces of Samsun in the future. Decades later, for securing Samsun’s historic role in Turkey’s independence, the by-then abandoned Mantika Hotel, the dismantled Bandırma and the demolished Tobacco Dock were successively restored (1998), reconstructed (2001) and rebuilt (2009). Abstract spaces of the official historiography were physically produced in order to represent and remember. Within this context, the author scrutinizes the production of space in the particular case of Samsun and analyses it through Lefebvre’s theoretical framework.

AbstractThis article examines the growing interest in questions of memory, trauma, and justice in Turkey, with a special focus on the notion of “coming to terms with the past.” Through an analysis of key academic and popular texts published between 2002 and 2013, it argues that “coming to terms with the past” is a therapeutic public discourse that rewrites national history through the temporality of trauma. In other words, this discourse reconfigures the sequence of past, present, and future as the beginning, development, and end of a case of collective trauma, applying the psychotherapeutic terminology of victimhood, healing, and forgiveness to social realities. The article offers new perspective on existing debates over “coming to terms with the past” by analyzing the limits of this therapeutic discourse and by exploring the potential and open-endedness of the politics of memory in Turkey.

La thèse étudie le régime de subjectivité des acteurs contestataires en Turquie afin d'interroger la nature des mouvements contemporains et les particularités de l'engagement à gauche. L'enquête qualitative qui débute avec les mobilisations consécutives à l'assassinat de Hrant Dink en 2007, se termine à la première commémoration du mouvement Gezi en 2014. Les données recueillies par entretiens et par observation auprès de plusieurs générations de militants et d'activistes sont analysées sous le prisme de la subjectivation et de la désubjectivation. Quels sont les effets des émotions, de la mémoire collective et des horizons d'attente sur la capacité d'agir des acteurs contestataires ? La première partie met en lumière la diversité des modalités d'action telles que les mobilisations de choc moral, les initiatives intellectuelles, les stratégies électorales, un festival de musique anti-guerre issu du mouvement altermondialiste. Les mobilisations qui rassemblent les générations révolutionnaires et les jeunes activistes relèvent des logiques globales de l'action collective. Les revendications de démocratie s'expriment à la fois par la transition de l'horizon révolutionnaire vers un paradigme des droits humains, et par des pratiques préfiguratives. La seconde partie examine la dialectique entre la mémoire et l'utopie dans l'imaginaire politique des acteurs. L'analyse des manifestations culturelles et politiques variées de la mémoire d'une gauche fragmentée, montre à la fois les permanences et les mutations dans les valeurs, les symboles, les habitus et le répertoire d'action. Tandis que le régime de subjectivité marqué par la défaite se transforme avec les représentations de soi comme victime de violence, les jeunes générations contribuent à l'élaboration d'une mémoire communicative. La lutte pour la démocratie se révèle aussi comme une lutte mémorielle afin de construire des récits partageables au niveau de la mémoire sociale. Conjuguée à une réflexion sur la fonction de l'utopie pour la capacité d'agir, la mémoire fait partie des outils de la grille d'analyse déployée pour étudier le mouvement Gezi de juin 2013. L'occupation du Parc Gezi révèle plusieurs caractéristiques concomitantes des mouvements contemporains, avec sa configuration affective, les dynamiques intergénérationnelles, la resymbolisation de l'espace, et la transgression des frontières symboliques de l'altérité. L'occupation du Parc Gezi est analysée comme la performance publique de l'utopie. La création de tels espaces d'expérience et de subjectivation ne présagent pas pour autant de la traduction en politique des mouvements. La marginalité et la condition minoritaire de la gauche constituent à la fois une ressource et une limite. La thèse propose une sociologie de la marginalité en contexte conservateur et autoritaire, et par là-même, la démonstration de la créativité de l'agir et de ses limites. En somme, les mouvements contemporains en Turquie comportent à la fois des composantes de mouvement social, de mouvement éthique et de mouvement d'expérience. Ils contestent les cadres historiques de l'altérité et du nationalisme par l'incarnation des pratiques démocratiques, et en créant un monde symbolique et axiologique alternatif aux orientations culturelles dominantes
The dissertation focuses on the regime of subjectivity of the actors of contestation in Turkey, in order to question the nature of the contemporary movements and the particularities of left-wing commitment. The fieldwork, that begins with the mobilizations following the assassination of Hrant Dink in 2007, ends at the first commemoration of the Gezi movement in 2014. Qualitative data collected through interviews and observation from different generations of militants and activists are analyzed through the lens of subjectivization and desubjectivization. What are the effects of emotions, collective memory and future horizons on agency ? The first part of the dissertation sheds light on the diversity of modalities of action such as moral shock mobilizations, initiatives of intellectuals, electoral strategies, an anti-war music festival from the anti-globalization movement. The mobilizations that bring together the revolutionary generations and the younger activists are part of the global logic of collective action. The claims of democracy are expressed both by the transition from the revolutionary horizon to a paradigm of human rights, and by prefigurative practices. The second part examines dialectics between memory and utopia in the political imaginary of actors. The analysis of the various cultural and political manifestations of the collective memory of a fragmented left shows both permanence and mutations in values, symbols, habitus and repertoire of action. While the regime of subjectivity marked by defeat is transformed with self-representations as victims of violence, the younger generations participate to the elaboration of a communicative memory. The struggle for democracy reveals itself as a memory struggle to build shareable narratives at the level of social memory. Combined with a reflection on the function of utopia for agency, memory is part of the analytical tools deployed to study the Gezi movement of June 2013. The occupation of Gezi Park displays several concomitant characteristics of contemporary movements, with its emotional configuration, the intergenerational dynamics, the resymbolisation of the space, and the transgression of the symbolic boundaries of alterity. The occupation of Gezi Park is analyzed as the public performance of utopia. The creation of such spaces of experience and subjectivization does not presage the translation into politics of movements. The marginality and the minority condition of the left can be both a resource and a limit. The dissertation proposes a sociology of marginality in a conservative and authoritarian context, and thus the demonstration of the creativity of action and its limits. In sum, contemporary movements in Turkey have both components of social movement, ethical movement and experience movement. They challenge the historical frameworks of alterity and nationalism by incarnating democratic practices and they create a symbolic and axiological world that is alternative to the dominant cultural orientations

Defence date: 28 May 2018
Examining Board: Prof. Alexander Etkind (EUI) ; Prof. emerita Luisa Passerini (EUI) ; Prof. emeritus Jay Winter (Yale University) ; Prof. Hülya Adak (Sabanci University)
Written during the centenary of the Armenian genocide, A Nation of Orphans focuses on the personal narratives of individuals who were touched, in one painful way or another, by the Armenian genocide of 1915 – individuals of different genders, social backgrounds, classes and ages. They range from orphans to school directors and presidents, from fathers to daughters and grandchildren, from genocide victims to perpetrators and bystanders. Engaging different modes of historical analysis, my thesis aspires to avoid two recent trends in Genocide Studies: a one-sided focus on either the perpetrators or the victims, and obsessive revolving around the notion of denial. Over the course of four chapters, A Nation of Orphans looks at how Turkey remembered the First World War and the Armenian genocide – what was spoken about but not said, and what was said but not spoken about. My central argument is that silence swept Turkey’s memorial landscape after the Great War. The Turkish silence about the Armenian genocide is both unique and characteristic of the silence that followed the Great War. An ideological break with the past, which was solicited by the republican political regime in the years following the war, and the legacy of the genocide have shaped modern Turkey. I make an effort to understand how silence would indeed become the language of the newly founded republic and how individuals dealt with this predicament of silence: how they came to identify themselves in this liminal situation between speech and silence, between remembering and forgetting, and how they nevertheless found ways of telling their personal stories.

This chapter presents Turkish literature as an incubator for the rise of counter-identity, exploring literature not merely as an instrument for exploring memories but, more important, as a site for storing and reconstituting them. The counterpoint of fictional writers and poets against professional historians and scholars is examined. In the case of Ottoman history, early Republican novels and poems were turned into texts of collective memory that offered a basis for reimagining the self simultaneously as Ottoman/Muslim and Turk. Literature stimulated interest and desire in Turkish readers to learn more about the past. The chapter also examines the Sufi orders and their role in preserving and reviving Ottoman memory.

In 1832, Smith consolidated and composed his earliest recorded memory of his vision in a short autobiography. It is best understood as an attempt to respond to the earlier rejection. Smith described his experience in terms he hoped would not upset the culture the Methodist minister represented, but in doing so Smith didn’t seem true to himself. So Smith’s 1832 autobiography is best understood as a conflicted consolidation—an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile his experience with a socially safe identity. For more than a century this memory remained outside the collection of items available for consolidating collective memory. For Joseph Smith’s individual memory, however, the 1832 consolidation fixed one point from which he never turned: he prayed to God in the woods, and his ministry began when God answered.

This essay examines the nature, scope and consequences of the seism of memory since its eruption in 2000 in Guadeloupe, French West Indies. In particular, it questions how the context of a multifaceted appetite for collective remembrance took the form of competing strategies for memorialization in the space. As such, it focuses on the heritage of pain, resistance and pride at the local, national and regional levels. I draw on Shalini Puri’s analysis of the repressed memory of the 1983 Grenada revolution in Operation Urgent Memory to identify in the landscape of Guadeloupe submerged, residual and eruptive ‘platforms of memory’ (Puri, 2012). In the specific case of Guadeloupe, the collective efforts of the Guadeloupean people for re-appropriating their non-French and non-European heritage on the island have turned into competitive post-traumatic approaches of the history of transatlantic slave trade. This essay eventually analyses the case of the Mémorial ACTe (MACTe) – Museum of Contemporary Caribbean Art and Memorial for the History of the Slave Trade – as constituting the most successful expression of what I define as cultural marronage, in the ambivalent postcolonial environment of the French Overseas Regions.

Taken together, the reputations which emerged in Francophone popular culture around a series of distinguished explorers, missionaries, empire builders or colonial administrators can be described as a site of collective memory, cementing in part the French ‘imagined community’ and sometimes spearheading cultural bridges within the French-speaking world in the postcolonial period. Turned into heroic figures endowed with national significance at the time of the ‘New Imperialism’ of the late nineteenth-century, through an elaborate process which involved the agency of a variety of hero-makers (and sometimes the heroes themselves) and the use of the newly-developed mass-media, the names of Lavigerie, Garnier, Brazza, Marchand, Lyautey, Foucauld and the like became sites of memory, both physically (through street or institution naming, statues, etc.) and culturally (through books, representations in the press and later in films, as well their place in the pantheon of school textbooks). Through colonial heroes, an unusual map of (post-)colonial France and the Francophone world emerges, which is much more complex than has been previously acknowledged, especially in the light of the interest of some post-independence African rulers in the colonial conquerors who gave birth to the modern states that they run.

This chapter recounts the difficult life of Nagasaki hibakusha during the first two postwar decades. It details the “dark era” from 1945 to 1957, when no national system of recognition, compensation, and medical benefits existed for the hibakusha of both cities. The chapter delves into the struggle of many hibakusha who chose to fight for political and social acknowledgment of their experience. It demonstrates how survivors and nonsurvivors alike came together and formed special-interest groups. The evolution of the activist groups was gradual and improvements in the lives of the hibakusha developed slowly over decades. The chapter then shifts to discuss the expansion of the political voice of the hibakusha and other activist groups from 1954 with the burgeoning of the anti-nuclear peace movement, achieving small but important victories along the way. Ultimately, the chapter examines the first medical relief law that passed in 1957. It also discusses how Nagasaki survivors turned to literature — testimony, narrative, and poetry — as their primary vehicle of memory activism, seeking to promote their narrative and resuscitate their collective experience in the popular memory of the bombings in both the city and the nation.

The notion “Soviet West” that is addressed in this chapter had its own political and cultural past during Soviet times that lived on in the collective memory of the Estonian and Russian communities on both sides of the border. In the nineteenth century, the crucible of modernity, the identity of both cultural spaces began to be shaped and take shape, despite the fact that the political boundary was shared; Estonia was part of the Russian Empire. As part of this process, identity boundaries were drawn for each cultural space using history. As an outcome of this long lasting process, Estonian cultural elites decided “to become Europeans”; in parallel Russia began to stress the unique character of their culture. The respective historical and art historical narratives were constructed. These boundaries persisted in collective consciousness, having become stronger and transmuted, in the latter half of twentieth century, constantly perpetuating oppositions and hierarchies. It was particularly the case of Estonian very small culture that felt to be threatened under the Soviet rule, as the active russification process started in the 1970s. However, one should bear in mind that unlike physical boundaries, Soviet-era cultural borders were characterized by permeability and the filtration or translation capability, which – as history has shown us – turned them into elastic cultural exchange elements, even if the national agenda (as in the case of Estonia) or political regime (like the Soviet Union) did not favour this process.