Carrying Our Country to the World: Turkey's Diplomatic Fashion Shows in the United States
Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, New York University
The formative years of the Republic of Turkey were characterized by a centralized secular modernization and a nation-building program. In 1928, a new type of school was established to facilitate women’s participation in these efforts: “the girls’ institutes.” Also operating as fashion houses, these public vocational schools attempted to develop a national style that would amalgamate a constructed Turkish culture with an imaginary Western civilization. The schools also organized the first major fashion shows in Turkey. In the Cold War Era, the institutes began organizing diplomatic fashion shows in honor of dignitaries visiting Turkey, and representing the country in international venues. These performances played a particularly important role in the diplomatic relations between Turkey and the United States.
In the light of extensive archival and ethnographic research, my presentation will analyze the diplomatic fashion show of Turkey as a genre where the discourses of secularism, modernization, postcoloniality, nationalism, and gender politics coalesce to create a performance of Turkish national identity. Exploring the socio-political dynamics that shaped the creation and reception of the shows Turkey organized in the United States in 1954, I will discuss the gendered and racial dimensions of Cold War politics.
Identity in the Making: Turkish Immigrants in New York and New Jersey
Zeynep Selen Artan-Bayhan, City University of New York
Islam has been “on trial” in the whole of the Western world since the September 11 attacks, which has been making life difficult and uncomfortable for many Muslim immigrants. Yet, the historical and structural characteristics of Europe and the United States present different contexts, generating diverse integration outcomes for Muslims. While Islam is increasingly perceived as irreconcilable with European values, there is in the United States no outright rejection and social construction of Islam as being anti-American, although anti-Muslim feelings do exist. Writings on the subject suggest that in secular Europe, the ethnic and religious stigma carried by Turkish immigrants hinder their integration processes. Yet, this is not the case on the other side of the Atlantic. This paper will first examine how Turkish immigrants in the United States predominantly pass as whites and, unlike in Europe, manage both to escape from any ethnic stigma and negotiate an understanding of self, then discuss the kind of boundaries they draw during this process.
Bedouins and The Wild East Show in 1893 The Chicago World’s Fair
Bengi Başaran, Istanbul Technical University
The XIX. century was a period of development for the Ottoman Empire in the fields of antiquities, archaeology, exhibition and museology. In this context, participation in international expositions became important. The Ottoman participation in the 1893 World Columbian Exposition (also called the Chicago World Fair) took place in the main sections of the Fair, with the official exhibition building Daire-i Osmaniye, “The Wild East Show” and “The Turkish Village.” The Turkish Village display was noteworthy for the Obelisk, the “Bedouin Encampment” and the mosque it contained. These buildings were significant in illustrating, for the first time internationally during the “westernization” period of the country, the Ottoman perception of the “East” and of the Byzantium legacy. With various architectural styles, the Ottoman Empire pavilion was eclectic. This paper aims to analyze The Wild East Show section and the representation of the Bedouins in the light of documents and photographs from the Fair found in the archives of Turkey and the United States.
Literature by Turkish Immigrants to America
Belma Ötüş Baskett, Middle East Technical University and Michigan State University
The largest number of immigrants from the Ottoman Empire arrived in the United States in 1913-1914, so one hundred years have passed. Since then, immigration has continued, and increased after 1960. I started my research for this paper on the premise that there must be some literature produced by these Turkish immigrants. I found fewer works than I had expected and, another surprise for me, they were mostly not about the immigrant experience,.
This paper will examine the literature by Turkish immigrants, answering questions of why and how and who. Special attention will be paid to five writers and their works and possible conclusions will be drawn. The writers, in alphabetical order of their last names , and their works are listed: Byron Ayanoğlu, From Istanbul to Montreal; Elif Batuman, The Posessed; Alev Aksoy Crotier, Harem; Güneli Gün, On The Road to Bagdad; Engin İnel Holmstrom, Loveswept.
In the paper the writers and their works will be examined by categorizing them in terms of genre and theme.
An American in Istanbul: Nature, Literature and Local Allegiances
Kim Fortuny, Boğaziçi University
For the past five years or so I have been writing articles focusing on literary engagements with nature. Eco-theory as a field of academic study began to coalesce in the early 1990s in the western United States. It has since gone global. My interest in the field did not begin with theory, however. It began with literature, with correspondences between American and Turkish literature to be precise. My first foray was an article that compared depictions of Istanbul in Herman Melville’s Near East Journals and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s Five Cities. I would go on to write about what I identify as Nazim Hikmet’s ecopoetics.
As a North American with roots in the green beauty of the Oregon Cascade Mountains, people often ask me, on both sides of the planet, why I live in Istanbul. Over the years I have developed various ways of responding publicly to what is for me a very personal question. This paper is one such response. In it I will trace the answer to my allegiances to nature and literature, allegiances that transcend national boundaries while grounding themselves in very local Turkish landscapes and literary traditions.
In Retrospect: Cultural Acquisitions and Partnerships in American Studies
Leman Giresunlu, Dokuz Eylül University
It was quite a valuable opportunity to have been granted a scholarship from the Turkish Higher Education Institution of Turkey via Izmir Dokuz Eylül University to study of American Studies, and Cultural Studies in Michigan and Ohio in the United States during 1992-1999. It allowed me at the same time to gain knowledge in area studies, and to familiarize myself with American culture, while also building valuable individual and professional partnerships.
With an acquired American Studies perspective I aspire to retrospectively assess through my personal accounts and observations the early expectations, and outcomes of this enduring journey towards academic fulfillment, and reflect upon its awaiting promises.
Furthermore, living as a graduate student in the United States of America has contributed considerably at personal and professional level for future research and teaching at my department in Dokuz Eylül University. In this respect this presentation aims to bring together an account of recollections as a memoir.
“The Gilt-Edged Mission”: Reflections on the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ First Century of Involvement in Anatolia
Brian Johnson, American Research Institute in Turkey
This paper focuses on the narrative of an English traveler who visited one of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ chief stations in Anatolia’s interior, at Merzifon, during a trek across the region on the eve of the First World War. His description of the institution illustrates the defining characteristics of the ABCFM’s presence in Anatolia a century after it began and at the brink of events that would alter it fundamentally in the coming decades. The talk will conclude with a summary of the ABCFM library and archival materials in the holdings of the American Research Institute in Turkey.
Watercolor Identities
Nükhet Kardam, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
I propose to present a digital story (about 18 minutes long) titled “Watercolor Identities.” This digital story will focus on the intertwining lives and identities of my grandfather, Dr. Kilisli Rifat and myself. This project started out as an exploration of my paternal grandfather Dr. Kilisli Rifat's life, the story of him and his family caught in the turmoil and wars of the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It is a story, through the eyes of one family, of momentous changes, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the building of a new nation-state called Turkey, and of changing identities, voluntarily and by force. I explore the striking parallels between my grandfather’s life and mine, the way we have both renegotiated and rediscovered our identities between the “East and the West”. Understanding who my grandfather was has led me to rethink my own identity, including growing up in Turkey as a “Turkish” citizen and living in the United States for more than thirty years as a “Turkish American.”
Negotiations of Turkish-Americanness in Joseph O'Neill's Postethnic Literature
Verena Laschinger, University of Erfurt
In my presentation I discuss negotiations of Turkish-Americanness in two works by Joseph O’Neill, which I consider representative for today’s budding “postethnic literary“ (see Florian Sedlmeier). My presentation aims to show how O’Neill’s texts engage with ethnicity as a contested concept in remarkably innovative and complex ways both in terms of content and form, and how they thus add a powerful Turkish-American perspective to the debate.In Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (2000), O’Neill, who became a U.S. citizen in 2007, recounts his grandfathers’ lives in Turkey and Ireland. Safely removed by generational distance, O’Neill’s narrative alter ego dissects the evidence of both of his grandfathers’ perplexingly similar criminal histories in the detached mode and razor-sharp language of a crime investigator, hence relaying the circumstances of the author’s own existence, heritage and ethnicity in a strictly historical, unsentimental manner. Sidestepping a more conventional employment of the autobiographical genre, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History complicates identity claims made via self-writing and defies ethnicity as an essentialist, timeless notion. O’Neill engages again with Turkish-Americanness in Netherland, his bestselling post 9/11 novel of 2008. Here appears Mehmet Taspinar, who is Turkish, from Istanbul, has lived in New York for a number of years, and who is “dressed as an angel” in a shabby “ankle-length wedding dress” and sporting a “pair of tattered white wings” (42). If an “angel is a messenger of God” (44), this one is but a pathetic crossdressing version of the fallen angel in post 9/11 New York City. Like the other transients in the novel, this Middle Eastern impersonation of Luzifer, who was wrongly suspected as a terrorist, can no longer make a home for himself in the traumatized metropolis. Having stirred “a mildly christophanous sensation” (160) only once, Taspinar, the reeking, mad, and utterly lost Turkish-American messenger of God, vanishes from the scene and the novel, never to reappear (265). The Turkish-American angle in Netherland, I suggest, is less sustained by the author’s Turkish descent (beware the autobiographical fallacy!) than by the novel’s powerful evocation of the devastating effects which America’s anti-terror campaign has on inter-faith and intercultural relations both within and beyond its national borders, and which the Turkish-American character Mehmet Taspinar symbolizes.
A Case for Smart Power from Istanbul
Louis Mazzari, Boğaziçi University
American Studies, as taught on the ground in universities around the world, is bound to the politics of U.S. foreign policy and the way it plays out in each particular country. The intensity of this connection between American Studies and American politics is seen nowhere more clearly than in Turkey—and especially in the history and current state of the field at Bogazici University in Istanbul, the oldest and most renowned American institution of any kind in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Since the onset of the Cold War, in particular, the field of American Studies at Boğaziçi, and in the country as a whole, has been both birthed and restricted by the relations between Turkey and the U.S.
This presentation reviews the history of American Studies at Bogazici from the perspective of an Americanist, who has taught U.S. history, literature, and American Studies through a transnational approach since 2007. The presentation will look at how the nations’ relations have been reflected in Boğaziçi’s approach to the field American Studies in general, and to the concept of transnationalism in particular.
The Assimilation Process of Turkish-Americans
Zafer Parlak, Izmir University
People become a part of the place they inhabit. Even if they resist change and assimilation, they cannot avoid being shaped by the social, cultural and physical conditions of their new environment; and they inevitably start to redefine themselves. Although this transformation does not necessarily require giving up old identities and ties, it encourages a new sense of belongingness, hence formation of a new identity.
The number of Turks and Turkish-Americans residing in the United States is estimated to be around 300,000. However, there is not enough information on the kind of assimilation and transformation process they undergo while they become a part of mainstream America. We also do not know much about the challenges they encounter, if and how they maintain their contact with the culture and country they left behind, and if they welcome or resist assimilation.
My presentation will seek answers to the above questions in personal accounts and memories of Turkish-Americans, derived from a survey given to Turks residing in the United States and having ties with Turkish-American associations. The survey includes mainly semi-structured and open ended questions to increase the variety of responses.
'We are all Androgynous': Staging America in Turkey
Ralph J. Poole, University of Salzburg
James Baldwin famously ‘signed’ his transatlantic novel Another Country with “Istanbul, Dec. 10, 1961” hinting to the fact of finishing it in Turkey (and not in Paris, as one might perhaps assume otherwise). Besides this novel, Baldwin actually wrote a whole series of texts during his decade in Turkey (1961-1971), perhaps most famously his memoir No Name in the Street and his essay collection The Fire Next Time. In all these texts of different genres, the question invariably arises as to whether his presence in Istanbul adds another layer of meaning to Baldwin’s discussions of American racial and sexual affairs that he deals with in these texts.
My specific interest, however, lies in both another group of works that link Baldwin to Istanbul and the trope of the ‘stage’ that figures prominently in various ways in these works. With sensational success, Baldwin staged John Herbert’s prison drama Fortune and Man’s Eyes, and he wrote the novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone about an actor as well as his third and unpublished play The Welcome Table while being self-exiled in Turkey. My claim is that in all these works revolving around staging, performing and play-acting, Baldwin continues to develop his notion of sexuality transcending borders of race, class, nation, and gender. Istanbul serves as transatlantic heterotopian space where such border-crossing sexualities may be tested and lived in stark contrast to Baldwin’s own American experiences. And yet, Baldwin’s trajectory remains American and therefore these works deal with American matters although being written and performed – staged – in Turkey.
A Poet and Intellectual in the USA: Seyfettin Başçıllar
Koray Üstün, Hacettepe University
Seyfettin Başçıllar was born in 1930 in Kilis, and completed the Ankara University Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in 1955. After graduation, he returned to his hometown and began working. When he was appointed to a small town after ten years of working in the profession, he resigned and moved with his wife to be with relatives in New Jersey. In the 37 years he lived in the United States until his death there, he continued to write and produce work in his native language, Turkish. However, the changing conditions within which he found himself affected his art: thematic variations became apparent in his work.
The objective of this paper is to study the works of this Turkish-American writer still using his mother tongue to demonstrate changes across the poetry and detect traces of cultural pluralism. In addition to analyzing available printed texts, the study will include reaching out to the poet’s wife, Mrs. Nevin Başçıllar, who still resides in New Jersey. It is hoped access to the unpublished poems will allow for a more thorough analysis of the poet’s universe.