Özge Samancı on ‘Dare to Disappoint: Growing up in Turkey’
October 12, 2016
Özge Samancı talks to Turkey Book Talk about her bestselling graphic memoir “Dare to Disappoint: Growing up in Turkey” (Farrar Straux Giroux). It’s a charming book and everyone I know who has read it raves about it.
Download the podcast episode or listen below.
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Here’s my review of the book from a few months ago.
Many thanks to current supporters Özlem Beyarslan, Steve Bryant, Andrew Cruickshank and Aaron Ataman.
Cem Emrence on ‘remapping the Ottoman Middle East’
July 15, 2016
Cem Emrence speaks to Turkey Book Talk about his book “Remapping the Ottoman Middle East: Modernity, Imperial Bureaucracy and Islam” (IB Tauris).
The book looks at Ottoman modernization through the 19th and early 20th centuries using an original model of “three-trajectories”: The coast, the interior, and the frontier, which each followed distinct paths to modernity.
Download the episode or listen below.
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Here’s my review of the book at Hürriyet Daily News.
If you like Turkey Book Talk and want to support independent podcasting, you can make a small or large monetary donation to the show via Patreon. Many thanks to current supporters Özlem Beyarslan, Steve Bryant and Andrew Cruickshank.
Maureen Freely joins to discuss the tragic life of author Sabahattin Ali and her translation of his classic 1943 novel “Madonna in a Fur Coat,” just published in a first ever English edition by Penguin.
Download the episode or listen below:
Subscribe to Turkey Book Talk: iTunes / PodBean / Stitcher / Facebook / RSS
Check my review of the book at Hürriyet Daily News, previously published in the Times Literary Supplement.
Support the Turkey Book Talk podcast with a per episode donation via Patreon – Many thanks to current supporters Özlem Beyarslan, Steve Bryant and Andrew Cruickshank.
Shadi Hamid on ‘Islamic exceptionalism’
June 4, 2016
Brookings Institution senior fellow Shadi Hamid joins the pod to discuss his new book ‘Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World’ (St Martins).
Download the episode or listen below:
Subscribe to Turkey Book Talk: iTunes / PodBean / Stitcher / Facebook / RSS
And here’s my review of the book at HDN.
Support the podcast with a per episode donation via Patreon! Many thanks to current supporters Özlem Beyarslan, Steve Bryant and Andrew Cruickshank.
Cihan Tuğal on the fall of the ‘Turkish model’
April 16, 2016
Cihan Tuğal, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, chats about “The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism” (Verso), charting how Turkey went from a model “Muslim democracy” for the Middle East to an increasingly authoritarian state.
Download the podcast or listen below:
Subscribe: iTunes / PodBean / Stitcher / Facebook / RSS
Here’s my review of the book at Hürriyet Daily News.
Support the Turkey Book Talk podcast via my Patreon account. You can help me keep producing the podcast by making a monetary donation, big or small, on a per episode basis! Many thanks to current supporters Sera Aleksandra Marshall and Andrew Cruickshank.
Mustafa Gurbuz on ‘rival Kurdish movements in Turkey’
March 12, 2016
The latest Turkey Book Talk podcast is with Mustafa Gürbüz, the author of “Rival Kurdish Movements in Turkey: Transforming Ethnic Conflict” (Amsterdam University Press).
Apologies for the delay in dropping this latest pod. I’ve had a technical nightmare.
Download the podcast or listen below.
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Here’s my review of the book at Hürriyet Daily News. Here’s the interview in written form.
Here’s another interview I did with him from last year about his research on the outlawed Kurdish Islamist militant group Hizbullah.
Finally, reposting my recent podcast with Frederike Geerdink discussing the Kurdish issue.
Frederike Geerdink on Turkey’s Kurdish question
February 5, 2016
This week’s podcast is with Frederike Geerdink, author of “The Boys are Dead: The Roboski Massacre and the Kurdish Question in Turkey” (Gomidas).
We chat about her time as a journalist in the Kurdish-majority city Diyarbakır, her deportation from Turkey last year, and the troubled history/present of the issue in the wake of the collapse of the peace process last summer.
Download the podcast, or listen below:
Here’s my review of the book at Hürriyet Daily News.
Subscribe to the Turkey Book Talk podcast via iTunes or via PodBean.
Follow Frederike Geerdink on Twitter.
Added bonus: I’ve dug out this interview from last year with sociologist Cem Emrence, co-author of “Zones of Rebellion: Kurdish Insurgents and the Turkish State” – quite a thought-provoking book.
Michael M. Gunter on the Kurds of Syria in peace and war
October 24, 2015
My interview this week was with Professor Michael M. Gunter, author of “Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War” (Hurst).
The slim book charts the Syrian Kurds’ rise to international profile since 2011, taking in their modern history under Ba’athist oppression, their development of “national conscience,” and ties between the PYD in northern Syria and the PKK in Turkey.
Download the interview in podcast form.
Please subscribe to the Turkey Book Talk Podcast via iTunes, via Podbean, or via Soundcloud.
Here’s the text of the interview at HDN.
And here’s my review.
Turkey’s LGBT crackdown
July 31, 2015
I’ve been walking in north Wales so haven’t had chance to post this piece I wrote on Turkey’s nervous LGBTIs and the “perils of visibility.” Clouds have darkened in recent weeks for LGBTIs in Turkey after last month’s police crackdown on the annual Pride March and a broader uptick in violent incidents and homophobic rhetoric.
The paradox I try to explain in the article is that this has accompanied an increasingly vocal LGBT rights activism that has flourished in the country over the past couple of decades:
“Yeşim Başaran, who works at LGBTI rights group Lambda Istanbul, agrees that a ‘conservative resistance’ has arisen in response to the campaign for recognition. ‘The two things have happened at the same time. The issue of LGBTI rights has become more visible in the media and activists have become more vocal. Opposition parties have nominated gay candidates in elections and have LGBTI people working in their party organizations. That would not have happened a few years ago,’ she says. ‘Life for LGBTIs in Turkey was never easy. They already were subject to attacks in public and within their families. They were at risk of being fired from their jobs or committing suicide. But in the last few weeks it has become more concrete.'”
Read the whole piece at Balkanist.
Istanbul’s 2013 Pride March, in happier times. Source: Wikipedia Commons.
It was particularly interesting to meet the pro-Erdoğan AK-LGBTI group. Many people assumed they were trolls, but I can confirm that they are serious and in the process of becoming a legally recognised “dernek” (association). Turkey is certainly full of surprises.
The rise of political Islam in Turkey
March 7, 2015
My review/interview double-header this week was based on “The Rise of Political Islam in Turkey: Urban Poverty, Grassroots Activism and Islamic Fundamentalism” by Kayhan Delibaş, who works at Kent University and Turkey’s Adnan Menderes University.
The book is well worth reading for anyone looking for a deeper look into the political context of the emergence of Islamist parties in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. While it’s true that political Islam is an intrinsically transnational phenomenon, it’s always worth remembering the specific conditions that have facilitated it’s emergence, which of course differ everywhere.
Here’s my review of the book in the Hurriyet Daily News.
And here’s my conversation with its author Kayhan Delibaş.
Talking Turkey
January 31, 2015
Just a quick post to say I’m going to be doing author interviews to accompany my book reviews in the Hürriyet Daily News. The interviews won’t be appearing every week, but if that week’s book is new, interesting, and the author is available, the conversation should be appearing shortly after the review. As the latter are published on Thursdays, that means either Friday or Saturday. I’ll be using the opportunity to discuss the main arguments in the book with the author, as well as some of the issues that I haven’t managed to address in the review.
Things got off to a good start a couple of weeks ago, when I spoke to Aaron Stein about his new book, “Turkey’s New Foreign Policy: Davutoğlu, the AKP and the Pursuit of Regional Order” (Routledge). Read the review here, and my chat with Aaron here.
This week, I spoke to Ryan Gingeras about his book “Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey” (OUP). Here’s the review, and here’s the interview.
Henceforth I’ll try to post links to both the reviews and the interviews here on the weekend after they come out.
The Turkish gov’t takes on the foreign media
December 10, 2014
I’ve written a piece for Foreign Policy on the deterioration of the Turkish government’s image in the international media, and Turkey’s aggressive response:
The foreign media image of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Turkish government has shattered over the past 18 months, and in response Turkey has ramped up an international information blitzkrieg.
The tone is becoming increasingly bitter, motivated by a conviction that the foreign media is a propaganda weapon deployed by the West to attack the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Patriotic Turks are called on to rally behind their government in the name of national sovereignty.
This sense of embattled defiance is important to understand, and reveals much about the resentful mindset gripping the state. Suspicion about the foreign press is hardly new in Turkey, but it’s unfortunate to see the worst of such sentiments returning – openly sponsored by Erdoğan and the AKP’s top brass. The president himself is even managing to turn international criticism to his own advantage, as evidence that the West is implacably hostile to Turkey and its fearless, truth-telling leader — a useful populist line ahead of next June’s crucial parliamentary elections.
Read the full article here.
Turkey Book Talk 