Spyros Sofos on Turkey’s many nationalisms
September 19, 2023
Turkey Book Talk #202 – Spyros Sofos, Assistant Professor in Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University, on “Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism” (Edinburgh University Press).
The book delves into the nuances and ambiguities of the term “the people” from the late Ottoman era to today, and how religious, secularist, left-wing and right-wing projects have used it for different ends.
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Turkey Book Talk #200 – Anthony Gad Bigio on “A Sephardi Turkish Patriot: Gad Franco in the Turmoil of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic” (Hamilton Books).
The book describes the turbulent and difficult life of Anthony’s grandfather, Gad Franco, a prominent journalist, social activist and lawyer in the late Ottoman and early republican eras. It also charts his gradual disillusionment after advocating Jewish integration into Ottoman and later Turkish society, which culminated in his imprisonment and impoverishment following the 1942 Wealth Tax.
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Turkey Book Talk #199 – James Meyer, associate professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University, on “Red Star over the Black Sea: Nazım Hikmet and His Generation” (Oxford University Press).
The book is a new biography of the great 20th century poet Nazım Hikmet (1902-1963). It draws deeply on previously untapped archival sources from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam and Washington, situating him within a broader generation of border-crossing Turkish communists.
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Read excerpts from Chapter 11 of the book.
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Turkey Book Talk #198 – Şebnem Gümüşcü, associate professor of political science at Middlebury College, on “Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia” (Cambridge University Press).
The book looks in depth at how intra-party factional struggles were key in shaping the AKP’s authoritarian direction in Turkey, while also comparing this with Islamist parties that won elections in Egypt and Tunisia.
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Turkey Book Talk #197 – Constanze Letsch on “Territorial Stigmatisation: Urban Renewal and Displacement in a Central Istanbul Neighbourhood” (Transcript).
The book examines a controversial project to demolish and rebuild Istanbul’s historic, troubled Tarlabaşı neighbourhood, the impact it had on locals and what that tells us about today’s Turkey.
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Download the ebook for free via the Transcript website.
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Turkey Book Talk #195 – Political communications strategist Derin Koçer on Turkey’s critical recent presidential and parliamentary elections.
The conversation addresses how economic woes may actually have helped Erdogan’s campaign, why the main opposition CHP repeatedly fails, whether nationalism is the real winner to emerge from the ballot boxes, and what awaits Turkey in the next five years.
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Read and subscribe to Derin Koçer’s Substack.
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Turkey Book Talk #193 – Aron Aji discusses the life and work of Turkish author Ferit Edgü
Aji’s translations of Edgü’s excellent, austere novellas “The Wounded Age” and “Eastern Tales” were recently published in a new single volume by New York Review Books.
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Turkey Book Talk #192 – Tezcan Gümüş of the University of Melbourne on “Turkey’s Political Leaders: Authoritarian Tendencies in a Democratic State” (Edinburgh University Press).
The book shows how almost all major political leaders throughout Turkey’s multi-party history have demonstrated authoritarian and undemocratic traits, reflecting and fostering the various failings of Turkey’s democratic system.
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Turkey Book Talk #191 – Paul Levin, director of Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies, on “Migration from Turkey to Sweden: Integration, Belonging and Transnational Community” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury), co-authored with Bahar Baser.
The conversation looks at the demographic profile of the Turkey-origin migrants in Sweden, the power dynamics of Turkish and Kurdish communities in the country, and the imbroglio over Ankara’s continued non-ratification of Stockholm’s Nato membership bid.
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Turkey Book Talk #190 – Maureen Freely on the life and work of the late Tezer Özlü.
Her translation of Özlü’s 1980 novel “Cold Nights of Childhood” has just been published for the first time in English by Serpent’s Tail.
First published in 1980, the book follows a narrator whose life closely mirrors Özlü’s own, growing up in Istanbul before periods in Berlin and Paris, unhappy marriages, and tortuous stays in psychiatric institutions. Despite being set against the backdrop of a uniquely turbulent era in Turkey’s modern history, the book is also characterised by its sexual frankness and political ambivalence.
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Turkey Book Talk #189 – Doğan Gürpınar, historian at Istanbul Technical University, on “Apparatchiks and Ideologues in Islamist Turkey: The Intellectual Order of Islamism and Populism” (Palgrave Macmillan).
The book gives a sweeping overview of the public messaging that underpins support for the Erdogan government in Turkey’s popular media sphere, as well as some of the individuals and institutions that contribute to crafting of message in the pro-government media industrial complex.
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Turkey Book Talk #184 – Gregory Goalwin, assistant professor and chair of the sociology department at Aurora University, on “Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey” (Rutgers University Press).
The book explores how religion – Catholicism in Ireland, Islam in Turkey – served as a fundamental building block of the two countries’ national identity throughout the 20th century.
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Become a member on Patreon to support Turkey Book Talk. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, links to related content upon publication of each episode, and over 200 book reviews covering Turkish and international fiction, history and politics.
Check out and sign up to the excellent weekly newsletter Turkey Recap.
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