This article focuses on a particular monument in Tophane, the Workers' Monument, which has been subjected to destructions ever since the time it was put in place in 1973 and which still stands in the same place as a crippled and unidentifiable body. Many people have referred to it as a “monster.” The term “monster” points to unacceptable forms of life, cast aside as “abnormal,” and can be of use in tracing how certain memories are crushed or abandoned and become aberrant. Thus, I argue that the story of the destruction of the Workers' Monument cannot be read independently of the performative command of the state, best observed in erecting Atatürk monuments all over the country as visual embodiments of power and furthermore securing and protecting them against destruction by the force of law. Monuments contribute to the closure of the past as a dead body. However, they also forge a regime of memory and desire that serves power. I dwell on the issue of monuments in Turkey in that interstice between life and death, that is, in their “monstrosity,” so as to reflect on what remains unrepresentable within the complex history—in other words, to reflect on the problem of power, history, and memory/counter-memory.

“The East” is an exceptional territory identified with Kurdish ethnicity within the geographical boundaries of the Turkish nation. This paper focuses on a critical historical moment, circa 2000-2004, when the promise of peace in this region was coupled with the explosive growth of urban consumer markets, to bring into public circulation a host of commercialized images of “the East” and “Eastern people.” It examines how “the East” became codified in popular television melodrama. It also tracks how “Eastern tourism” became incorporated into middle-class leisure practices. By juxtaposing television narratives and tourist narratives, it argues that the commodification in cultural markets both affirms its “exceptionalism” and challenges its taken-for-granted parameters.

On May 31,2010, Israeli Defense Forces raided the ship Mavi Marmara, part of a six-vessel flotilla aiming to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip and to deliver supplies to Gaza. Using comments posted on Turkish online discussion forums in the aftermath of the raid that resulted in the death of nine passengers, this article analyzes how the incident was appropriated to negotiate between Turkishness and Islam as two alternative, yet coinciding forms of collective identity. Particularly, the article will compare different discursive strategies that were utilized in “general-interest” and “Islamic-leaning” online discussion groups. A deductive thematic analysis of 585 posts in general-interest and Islamic-leaning forums found significant differences in how metaphors of the body—blood, sacrifice, and martyrdom—as well as in-group/out-group comparisons were used in order to support a territorial-based nationalism versus a religion-based identity. The analysis also discusses the rhetoric that enabled discussants in general-interest forums to negotiate the tensions between the two collective identities.

This article focuses on a scandal surrounding the airing of an episode of Germany's most famous TV crime series, in which there occurred a murder in an Alevi immigrant family originally attributed to a Sunni Muslim who had just arrived from Turkey. The Alevi father and head of the family was then found out to have murdered his own daughter after she had threatened to reveal that he was sexually abusing her sister. The episode was met with an enormous outcry from Alevis based in Germany as well as in Turkey. This essay analyzes the protests for what they reveal about the trans-nationalization of stereotypes and immigrant demands for fair media representation in Germany. It is argued that it marks a new stage in the development of border-crossing public spheres in which the politics of cultural struggle in relation to ethnic and religious hierarchies lose some of their national moorings.

This paper studies the idea of Turkishness as one thematic element that commonly characterizes recent Turkish box-office champions. The preoccupation with the idea of Turkishness in recent popular cinema can be seen as a reflection of Turkish society's bafflement with the process of rapid and intensive transformation during the 2000s. In this period, Turkish society has grown increasingly confused about how to assess its own worth in the contemporary world. The paper makes use of the terms “magnificence” and “monstrosity” to make sense of the excessive representations of Turkishness in Turkish box-office champion action films and comedies of the second half of the 2000s. The term “magnificence” stands for aspirations in Turkish society during the last decade about the revival of the glory of the Ottoman past and becoming a powerful actor again on the world scene. The term “monstrosity” is employed in relation to Turkish society's cynical indifference to the violence perpetrated by the Turkish state, which is often rendered acceptable through the presumption of “Turkish peculiarity.” The paper points to the continuity between recent blockbuster action films and comedies in their representations of Turkishness by suggesting that magnificence and monstrosity appear in these films as two sides of the same coin.

While the increasing interest in contemporary art from Turkey has centered on explicitly political works, discussions on the limitations of the freedom of expression have likewise come under the spotlight, not least with regard to Turkey's EU candidacy. In contrast to the attempts of complete suppression marking the 1980 coup d'état and its aftermath, current censorship mechanisms aim to delegitimize and discourage artistic expressions (and their circulation) that can be construed as threatening the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Turkish state, and to turn their producers into targets. This article investigates selected images produced in the contemporary art world between 2005 and 2008, which were taken to transcend the limits of what constitutes tolerable depictions of Turkey's socio-political realities. It examines current modalities of censorship in the visual arts and the different actors involved in silencing efforts. The cases show that within these fields of delimitation there are considerable contingencies: The domain of the unspeakable remains unclearly mapped. I argue that it is because, not despite, this arbitrariness that delegitimizing interventions are successful, in that they (a) create incentives for self-censorship, and (b) produce defenses of artistic freedom that, by highlighting the autonomy of art, to some extent consolidate a conceptual separation of art from politics.

This paper scrutinizes anxieties of national identity in Turkey through the image of Zeki Müren in three films, Beklenen Şarkı, Kırık Plak, and Son Beste. In these films the image of Zeki Müren is articulated as the ridiculous sublime. His image always tells two stories simultaneously: construction and collapse of national identity. Through an analysis of Müren's early films, the paper shows, how anxieties about the formation of Turkish citizenship and about modernity are substantiated in his image. This analysis is carried out in the following steps: I, first, explain how the films chosen here construct the feeling of we-ness and national imaginary by virtue of Classical Turkish music and the voice of Zeki Müren. I show that the image of Zeki Müren in these films tells the story of the national subject being interpellated or hailed by Turkishness and argue that Zeki Müren's image exposes the “speculary” structure of Turkishness. Examining the construction, completeness, and integrity of Turkish national identity the paper continues to explore its collapse, incompleteness, and disintegration–that is, the dimension of “beyond interpellation.” Put differently, I analyze how the feeling of we-ness collapses and explore the pleasure and torment produced through the relationship between social power and the subject. With the help of these two axes of exploration, I show how the torment as well as the pleasure of subjection, the desire to be recognized as well as the fear of not being recognized is the text of Zeki Müren's image in these films.