Amy Mills

Boundaries of the nation in the space of the urban: landscape and social memory in Istanbul

Kuzguncuk, Istanbul, is known for its small-scale neighbourhood landscape and its close social ties, as well as its multiethnic history. The Armenian church and the mosque in Kuzguncuk have become symbolic ‘evidence’, in popular culture, of past multiethnic harmony. A Muslim elite is restoring Kuzguncuks historic houses and its neighbourhood culture. The production of Kuzguncuks landscape is sustained by two interrelated nostalgic narratives: a narrative of multicultural tolerance; and the narrative of the neighbourhood, the mahalle, as the urban space of belonging and familiarity. However, the ‘lie of the land’ is that this landscape obscures a contentious and traumatic minority history, and gentrification is creating new social divides. Kuzguncuks minorities are gone. The traumas they experienced during mid-century Turkification, as well as the current divisions of class and origin in Kuzguncuk, are denied in the popular narrative. This denial attempts to hide tension embedded in the national narrative of belonging. This study of the power dynamics shaping Kuzguncuks landscape examines the terms of belonging, of being a ‘Turk’, in Turkey, a debate which both redraws and contests the boundaries of the nation in the space of the urban.

Gender and Mahalle (Neighborhood) Space in Istanbul

Studies of gender have an important place in studies of Turkey because the discourses of Islamism and secularism, and modernity and tradition, make the bodies and practices of Turkish women the site of debate. However, few studies have used a spatial analysis to examine the production of gender in daily life. This article is simultaneously a study of how gender is produced through space and of the creation of various kinds of spaces in an Istanbul mahalle (neighborhood). The mahalle is the space of intimate daily life in the Turkish urban context, and narratives of and ways of life in the mahalle articulate competing notions of what it means to be a woman in Turkey. This study of gender and mahalle space reveals the linkages between space and gender to be multiple and shifting and the boundaries between private and public spaces to be fluid. Furthermore, this reading of gender and urban space, when brought back to the Turkish context, also contributes to research which interrogates the idea of modernity at the core of national identity in Turkey, of which gender is a central and constitutive element.

NARRATIVES IN CITY LANDSCAPES: CULTURAL IDENTITY IN ISTANBUL*

Abstract. Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, when the Turkish nation was defined as ethnically Turkish and Muslim, the issue of ethnic minorities has been at the root of a deep insecurity concerning cultural identity and what it means to be Turkish. The movement to “recover” ethnic minority in history and in place is most visible in Istanbul, the city identified as the location of European culture in Turkey and Turkeys most culturally pluralistic city. The movement has gained pace since the formal acceptance of Turkey as a candidate for membership in the European Union and the push for reforms in human rights. It is promoted by a very small cultural and economic elite and works together with gentrification to produce elite spaces in the city, as exemplified by two neighborhoods: Kuzguncuk, a historic minority neighborhood on the Asian shore of the Bosporus; and “French Street,” a new commercial development in Beyoǧlu, on the European side of the city west of the Bosporus. These landscapes articulate a European, cosmopolitan, and multicultural place identity for Istanbul and reflect a particular notion of Turkey as modern and European, providing insight into the contemporary debate in Turkey concerning the tensions embedded at the core of Turkish cultural identity.

The Ottoman Legacy: Urban Geographies, National Imaginaries, and Global Discourses of Tolerance

��� past: the city is itself the site of the construction of the Ottoman legacy, of the making of a national present through particular imaginations of history. 2 I argue that the city is also remade through this process, as landscapes and neighborhoods that recall a sense of the Ottoman past are not only preserved but created anew, illuminating the subjective and processual nature of the Ottoman legacy. This essay’s focus on the urban nature of the Ottoman legacy is based on Istanbul, as the city of Istanbul has long symbolized the Ottoman legacy in the Turkish national imagination. The importance of the Ottoman past (or of denying it completely) as an instrument with which to construct and debate Turkish national identity cannot be overstated. 3 Thus the Ottoman legacy is, as the other essays in this collection argue, a product of particular national contexts. As I argue in this essay, the nationalist context is an inherently global one, as well, as discourses of tolerance and of East/West embedded in notions of the Ottoman past and the Turkish present locate Istanbul as both a national and a global city. Istanbul’s mosques, fountains, palaces, and cemeteries were so prevalent, and so rich with the city’s undesired heritage as the former imperial center, that the founders of Turkey sought a capital city for the new republic. “Istanbul’s name had been debased as emblematic of Ottoman decadence, pollution, miscegenation, against which the purity of a new national culture — located in Ankara — could be imagined.” 4 Ankara became a clean slate on which to narrate the foundations of a new nation directed away from the Islamic, multiethnic Ottoman

THE PLACE OF LOCALITY FOR IDENTITY IN THE NATION: MINORITY NARRATIVES OF COSMOPOLITAN ISTANBUL

A greater understanding of the politics of nationalism and identity must consider the importance of locality. This research, conducted among Muslims and non-Muslim minorities in Istanbul, Turkey, and Tel Aviv, Israel, relies on place narratives of Istanbul during the mid-20th century, when Istanbul was transforming into a predominantly Muslim, “Turkish” city. Place narratives reveal the multiplicity of interpretations of the national past and are thus a powerful resource for examining the cultural politics of identity in the national present. This research contributes to studies of national identity, which have traditionally focused on the top-down role of the state in producing the nation, by examining the processes through which ordinary people make meaning of the state-authored nation. I conclude that place-based relationships can transcend national/minority frameworks for identity, as shared ties to local place create feelings of common belonging among diverse residents

The Ottoman Empire from Present to Past: Memory and Ideology in Turkey and the Arab World

he Ottoman Empire died in 1923 with the disestablishment of the sultanate and the proclamation of a new Turkish republic. For some years the empire had led merely a shadow existence. Defeated in World War I, shorn of its sovereignty, occupied by foreign armies, wracked by civil war, torn by ethnic conflict, and stained by state- led massacres of Armenian citizens, the empire ended badly and was little mourned. Paraphrasing Charles Dickens, one could accurately have said that the empire was dead to begin with. There was no doubt about that. But as the articles in this collection reveal, the death of the empire involved a creative rupture. This rupture involved both a dramatic break from each successor state’s imperial past as well as a continual reference to it, through successive iterations of what the Ottoman legacy could or should mean. Initially, elites in the Ottoman successor states wasted little time disowning the memory of the multinational state that they once had served. Political leaders, educators, and governments promoted ethnic nationalist ideologies (especially Turkish and Arab) as new, modern sources of political legitimacy. The Ottoman past, packaged as a story of political oppression, cultural stagnation, and long military decline, served mainly as a foil for the nationalist narrative, as an antithesis to the nation’s glorious past and its imminent rebirth. Yet so many centuries of history could not easily be tucked away. Nationalist narratives were, themselves, based on selective remembering and on wholesale suppression or forgetting. At moments of national crisis, or during episodes of acute power struggles within successor states, the Ottoman past broke its silence. Sometimes this past was invoked (negatively) as a “ghost” haunting the present, and other times as a rich reservoir of historical experience. Either way, the empire and its legacy proved not to be as dead as once imagined. 1 The articles collected here highlight a number of themes in understandings and evaluations of the Ottoman past from some of the empire’s successor states along the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores, areas conventionally lumped together as part of the “Islamic World.” Yet as these contributions demonstrate, they are areas that exhibit a fascinating diversity of issues and impasses associated with the Ottoman past. Contributors discuss con

The Cultural Geopolitics of Ethnic Nationalism: Turkish Urbanism in Occupied Istanbul (1918–1923)

What are the roles of history and memory in geopolitics? How does urban experience influence geopolitical understandings of ones place in the world? This article brings these questions to a study of how Ottoman Turkish citizens of Istanbul came to link ethnicity with nationalism and to view their Greek Orthodox neighbors as national betrayers. I propose an explicitly cultural geopolitics: an affective, embodied critical geopolitics contextually dependent on experience, encounter, and memory in place. My sources are postwar Ottoman humor gazettes published in Istanbul, the waning capital of the Ottoman Empire, while it was occupied by Allied forces immediately after World War I. The future sovereignty of the city was unknown, and there was no coherent state structure. As normative (and also subversive) popular media, humor gazettes illustrate the reverberation of postwar geopolitics with the lived and remembered processes of urban place. Ethno-nationalist Turkish belonging in Istanbul was a form of urbanism, composed of place-based norms for behavior and a commonly understood cultural geography of the city. Satirical depictions of urban Turkish and Greek encounters during the armistice era betray a Turkish anxiety surrounding territorial and historical claims to the city and also a simultaneous questioning and hardening of the imagined geographies that demarcated Turkish and Greek identities as nationally distinct. This research illuminates the topological and relational dimensions of ethno-nationalist identity formation and the role of urban cultural processes in political belonging in the contemporary Middle East.