Turkey Book Talk #264Murat Yıldız, associate professor of history at Skidmore College, on “The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul” (University of Texas Press)

The book examines the emergence of sports culture in late Ottoman Istanbul and its implications for developing ideas of modernisation, imperial identity, religious identity, communal identity and gender norms. It also shows how Muslims, Christians and Jews created an athletics culture in schools, clubs and publications that in some ways transcended ethnoreligious divisions but in other ways reinforced them.

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