This chapter turns the attention to the relationship between master narratives and counter-narratives. It shows the ramification of the interaction between these two types of narratives through the analysis of the case of the Gezi movement. The Gezi movement started with the protests at the Taksim Square in Istanbul in the last days of May. The protests were a reaction to the government plan to uproot trees in Gezi Park to rebuild the demolished Topçu Barracks from the Ottoman Empire and to construct a new shopping mall. In response to police violence against the peaceful protesters at Gezi Park, the movement grew and spread throughout Turkey in the summer of 2013. Protests in continuation of Gezi were reported in every province in Turkey, except for the predominantly ultraconservative small northeast Anatolian province of Bayburt.

The interactions of Gezi protesters with the dominant narratives of those in power open multiple entry points in the discussion of counter-narratives and their political implications. For example, Bamberg (2004, 362–3) argues against seeing master and counter-narratives as being entirely separate, oppositional narratives. In his discussion of how counter-narratives interact with dominant narratives, he shows how sometimes counter-narratives can appropriate and transform dominant narratives by keeping the plotline more or less intact but introducing ‘counter characters’ or otherwise reshaping or reconfiguring certain aspects of dominant narratives. Existing studies on counter-narratives mostly focus on how personal counter-narratives interact with dominant narratives. (See, for instance, the set of studies introduced by Andrews (2004) as well as Squire et al. (2014).) The goal of this chapter is to trace this interaction at the collective level.

Recognising the dialogical character of narratives is a productive starting point to understand how dominant and counter-narratives operate. As Wertsch (2002, 517) argues, ‘the meaning and form of one narrative may be understood in terms of being a dialogic response to another, previous one, in terms of anticipating another, subsequent narrative, and so forth’. Utilising Bakhtinian dialogicality (Bakhtin 2013), the chapter takes a close look at the slogans, graffiti and other forms of expression at Gezi to illustrate its point.