The Impact of Ottoman Immigration on Turkish-American Relations
Işıl Acehan, İpek University
At the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, a considerable number of Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Albanians, Greeks, and Sephardic Jews left the Ottoman Empire for economic as well as political reasons. Although the previous literature on the history of U.S-Turkish relations focuses on the American missionary activities as one of the most significant aspects of US-Ottoman relations, the impact of Ottoman migration to the U.S. on Turkish-American relations has not been studied extensively yet. However, a number of American sources, such as the Annual Reports of the Commissioner General of Immigration, show that Ottoman migration to the U.S., which sometimes raised the tension between the two governments, had a considerable role in the Turkish-American relations. This paper will examine the impact of Ottoman immigration on U.S.-Turkey relations at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the conflict and cooperation between the Turkish and American governments on the issue of immigration.
A Brief Look at the Literature about the Turkish Immigration to the United States of America and the Hitherto Unrecorded Story of Osman and Timur
Belma Baskett, International Society for Literature and Theatre
I waish to discuss two Turkish books that are of major importance on the topic of immigration of Turks to America that otherwise may not be mentioned in the workshop. The first book, Bir Devrimci Doktorun Anıları (Memoirs of A Revolutionary Doctor) first published in 1925, was written by Dr. Mehmet Fuat Umay from his journal of his trip to the USA in March-May 1923. The other book is Anadolu'dan Yeni Dünyaya: Amerika'ya İlk Göç Eden Türklerin Yaşam Öyküleri (From Anatolia to the New World: The Life Stories of the First Turkish Immigrants to America) by Rıfat N.Bali, published in 2004.
Dr. Umay was a medical doctor and the secretary general of Himaye-i Etfal Cemiyeti - Association for the Protection of Children in Turkey. He went to the USA on the suggestion of Türk Yardımlaşma Derneği - the Turkish Charity Association of New York - to solicit donations from the Turkish immigrants in the USA for the thousands of orphans left in dire need after the Turkish War of Independence. During his trip, he collected a great sum of money which was used for new buildings and institutions for the care of orphaned children in Turkey. His memoirs contain information about the Turkish immigrants he met, and are written in an informal manner.
Bali is a sociologist. His book is a very scholarly book based on serious archival research. He has an extensive bibliography. The book thoroughly covers the topic fromthe earliest years to almost the present.>
Both books contain some of the same material. It is interesting to meet the same key figures in both books. Sabiha Sertel, for example, was a student in New York when Dr Umay met her; she travelled with him and was his interpreter. In the Bali book, she and her works on the subject appear as one of his sources.
History of Turkish-American Relations
Pınar Dost-Niyego, Atlantic Council Istanbul Office
The historiography of Turkish-American relations has focused on the post-World War II period, during which relations between the two countries intensified because of a new, U.S. policy of containing the Soviet Union. According to this account, the origin of U.S. interest in Turkey can only be explained if approached through the framework of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. Thus, this approach cannot speak of a U.S. "Turkish policy" prior to the declaration of the Truman Doctrine.
Contrary to prevalent historiography, the foundations of the tight post-war Turkish-American relations were laid during the war, not only because of the Soviet threat, but because of a new U.S. global policy defined before the advent of the Cold War. U.S. postwar awareness of the Middle East in general and Turkey in particular derived not only from the events of the period 1945-1947, but also from U.S. experience accumulated during the war in the region. Events and conditions of the conflict itself resulted in American military and civilian specialists producing a mass of reports and strategic plans for the postwar Middle East, in which Turkey occupied a crucial position.
The foundations of the new U.S. Turkish policy can be summarized in three themes: a new U.S. international trade policy; the American desire to extend its hegemony in the Near and Middle East; and the installation of bases overseas. These three elements were closely related: the U.S. policy of international trade and installation of overseas bases depended on American desire to extend its hegemony in the Near and Middle East.
What's in a Hyphen?: Between Turkish American Studies and Turkish-American Studies
Brian Edwards, Northwestern University
This paper takes the occasion of the 2014 workshop held at Boğaziçi University to think critically about the relationship between the dual aspects of its promise: as a new chapter in Turkish or Turkey-based approaches to the field called “American Studies” and as a renewed focus on the study of Turks in the United States. I explore the tension between Turkish American Studies and Turkish-American Studies in the context of ongoing debates about the field and its transnational dimensions, as well as the critique of the relationship of American Studies to the history and logics of American Exceptionalism. I build here on my own work in "American Studies in Motion: Tehran, Hyderabad, Cairo,” and in my extended critical introduction (with Dilip Gaonkar) to Globalizing American Studies (Chicago, 2010), in which Gaonkar and I argued that approaches to American Studies from outside the United States had the potential to reveal “America” as a fragment and to highlight the rubric of circulation, both crucial new directions for the field in the 21st century. My title for this paper plays on Janice Radway’s famous 1998 Presidential address to the American Studies Association, which interrogated the tensions implicit in both field and association as gleaned through the rhetoric of naming. Radway herself invoked Mary Helen Washington, whose presidential address the previous year asked, "What Happens to American Studies if You Put African American Studies at the Center?" So in my paper, I will ask both, “what’s in a hyphen?” and “what happens to Turkish American studies when you put Turkish-American studies at the center?”
Turkish Tailors Establishing Themselves in American Society: Experiences of ‘Lower Class’ Immigrants
Tahire Erman, Bilkent University
This paper is about Turkish tailors living in Methuen, Massachusetts. They moved to the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s upon the demand of the American government for tailors to work for the textile and clothing companies in Rochester, New York. They were initially all men and moved to Rochester with the intention to save money and return home. They brought their families in the coming months and they were joined by other Turkish immigrants over the years. When the economic crisis hit the clothing industry in Rochester, some of them moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Today some live in Methuen clustered around the mosque turned from an old church. This article is based upon an in-depth study of these tailors and their families between September 2005 and May 2006. A couple of visits were also made to the mosque and its community in November 2007 and July 2009. As ‘lower class’ Turkish immigrants living in the U.S., their study contributes to our understanding of immigrants by demonstrating the problems they have faced, especially when they were discriminated by the mainstream Turkish migrant community, and the strategies they have developed to survive in their new society as ‘lower-class’ people.
An Implausible Juncture? : Locating Turkish Literature in an American frame.
Elena Furlanetto, University of Duisburg Essen
In her 1998 article “Ethnic Fatigue: Başçıllar's Poetry as a Metaphor for the Other ‘Other Literature’,” Gönül Pultar defines the concept of Turkish-American literature as problematic, to the point of questioning the very possibility of it. The problem highlighted by Pultar seems to be that the Turkish and the American spheres hardly ever intersect: for this reason, the “putative juncture” (Pultar, 1998: 126) between these two dialectic selves, sparkling the possibility of an ethnic literature in English, is problematic at best, implausible at worst. Yet, in 2005, the publication of Elif Shafak’s first novel in English, The Saint of Incipient Insanities, made Turkish novelists visible on the world literature arena, and pointed at the necessity to address a tradition of Turkish literature in English that develops along a Turkish-American axis, and yet eludes the canons of ‘migrant literature.’ My paper calls for a reconsideration of ‘Turkish-American literature’ as a transnational phenomenon that covers a much larger field than literature produced by Turkish immigrants in the United States. Shafak’s Anglophone oeuvre emerges as a representative of a prolific branch of Turkish literature in a specifically American frame, written in English, negotiating the American influence on Turkey’s modern identity and addressing a double readership.
Second Generation of Turks who Migrated to America
Müzeyyen Güler, Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts
This paper presents data obtained during a research done on second-generation children of Turks who migrated to America 40 years ago. The research, comprising an 129 item questionnaire and intensive observation, was done in the fall of 2010 and and the winter of 2011. The sample consisted of 129 youths aged between 16 and 29 . They were chosen among those living on the east coast of America, using the snowball technique. The way the "American-Turk" identities of the young Turks in the new continent are formed, in mosques, schools and Turkish parade and culture days, their being in-between two cultures, their conflicts with their parents, their education, learning the language and working conditions and their residential areas were examined.
Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home: Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Ideas about the Old World and the Ottoman Empire
Bahar Gürsel, Middle East Technical University
For the scholars who would like to scrutinize the progress of national literature in the United States, the writings of nineteenth-century American female writers have a particular significance. The majority of those names came from highly literate and educated American families, some of them made their living from their writing, and most of them became the symbols of the changing roles of women in the United States. Apart from reflecting the general framework of the American society and literature, the works of those writers would also be constructive in grasping the attitude of the European/white Americans regarding the other people who lived inside and outside Europe and the West since a number of those literary figures had the opportunity to travel to different countries in the Old World in the nineteenth century. Some of the stories and novels that were composed by that group of literary figures provide a substantial analysis of the formation of different ethnic stereotypes in the United States, and also enable to realize how American female writers defined the West, the East and their peculiar characteristics. From their point of view, was the United States the epitome of civilization and progress, or did they also deem some specific countries of the Old World as the representatives of Western and Christian civilization, whereas they regarded other particular countries and nations as the nadir of human development? More significantly, what was the place of the Ottoman Empire in the mind of a nineteenth-century American female intellectual?
In order to seek answers for the above-mentioned (and similar) questions, this paper will focus on a short story written by a very prominent female writer in the United States during the aforementioned time period. Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867), who is predominantly known for her works like A New England Tale, Redwood, Hope Leslie, or Early Times in America, in which she referred to the key characteristics of American culture and society via her central characters that were generally women, traveled in Europe with her brother and his family in 1838-1840. On her return to America, she published her Letters from Abroad (1841), which is an account of the places that she went to in the Old World. One of her stories in that work, “Marietza,” reveals the depressing and appalling story of a Greek girl who witnessed the Greek Uprisings of 1821. This paper will concentrate on Marietza’s tale with the purpose of uncovering the American attitude about the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s. It will not only aim to provide a nineteenth-century transnational view of the image of the Turk in the United States, it will also endeavor to display certain patterns and definitions about race and ethnicity which were presented to nineteenth-century American society via the works of female writers. In addition, it would not only concentrate on the American views concerning the Orient, it would also help to realize how Americans portrayed and identified Europe and the West.
Building up a New Identity through Music: The Case of Ahmet Ertegün
Elif Huntürk, Bilkent University
Founder of the worldwide known Atlantic Record Company, Ahmet Ertegun guided the music industry of his time. Today he is regarded as the most influential music producer by the music authorities. Being a diplomat’s son, Ertegun spend his childhood and early adolescence in several European cities. His temporary immigrations started when he was two and ended up in the States in 1934. When his father died in 1944, his family went back to Turkey yet he and his brother Nesuhi stayed. Ertegun came to the States as a diplomat’s son yet became an ordinary immigrant after the death of his father. Real immigrant experience inside the music culture reshaped his identity. This paper will focus on the transformation of a first-generation Republican elite. I will specifically emphasize the role of music in the Americanization process.
Orientalism to Neo-Orientalism: Turkish Studies in the US
Tuğrul Keskin, Portland State University
At the end of WWII, the United States had become a global political power, but had been competing with the Soviet Union in the developing world over political and social spaces. As a result of Cold War politics, the United States borrowed the old imperial policies of Europe, which were based on classical orientalism, defined in Edward Said’s famous work. Therefore, in the 1950’s, the United States national security strategy started to design area studies within American Universities funded by the Department of Education, Department of Defense, and the Department of State. However, this policy involved a multi-layered approach and was based not just in the universities, but also at government-funded agencies and non-governmental organizations. Therefore, the Fulbright program and the Peace Corps were established. The first Middle East Studies centers were established at Harvard, Princeton and Portland State University. This was the beginning stage of academic involvement in Turkish Studies in the United States. However, over the years, Turkey’s strategic geopolitical importance attracted attention from Washington policy makers. Between 1959 and 1972, there were twenty-seven American military bases, and thirty thousand US troops deployed in Turkey in addition to many Fulbright Scholars and Peace Corps volunteers. In the 1980’s, this orientalist approach has transformed into a more policy-oriented form of neo-orientalism during the neoliberal era in the United States and Turkey. As a result, we witnessed the growth of Turkish Studies academic programs in the American education system, funded by the Turkish government, US Department of State, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Education. This NATO-based academic orientation facilitated the imperial domination of Turkey by the United States. After September 11, 2001, this growth has accelerated and Turkish politics and language have become a part of the National Security Strategy of the United States. In this paper, I will examine the emergence, current trend, and growth of Neo-Orientalism within Turkish Studies in the United States since the 1950s.
Organizational Interpretations of Belonging and Identity - Politics of Incorporation among Turkish American Associations in New York
Zeynep Kılıç, University of Alaska, Anchorage
This paper explores organizational perspectives on belonging and immigrant incorporation among Turkish associations in New York metropolitan area. Data comes from 21 in-depth interviews with active community organization leaders, politicians and other discourse setters (consulates, writers, journalists) in addition to participant observations in the community events. Immigrant belonging, gauged by migrant organizational strategies put forward, are shaped in large part by the receiving state’s legal framework especially as it relates to formal citizenship as well as social and racial hierarchies present in the host country. Migrant organizations have to engage the institutional framework on a regular basis for policy concerns, financial reasons or for representational reasons within popular discourses. This paper reveals how organizational strategies are shaped by the U.S. discourse, as reflected in associations’ mission, activities and projects, and the role of Turkey in matters of representation. Migrant organizations respond to host society’s understanding of immigrants, their socio-economic status in the host society as well as historical and contemporary issues surrounding the immigrant group in question. Hence Turkish organizations attempt a desirable public image by responding to U.S. discourses on migration, belonging and cultural membership through claims they make and participation in spectacles such as the Turkish Day Parade.
A Study of ATAA (Assembly of Turkish American Associations)
Alice Leri, University of South Carolina
There is no precise convergence between the discourses the subject creates about one´s self and the ones which produce collective identities. Identification, in fact, is always imperfect and constantly subject to changes.
In the US, today, the making of Turkish American identities is mainly concentrated in the hands of two hegemonic factions represented by ATAA (Assembly of Turkish American Associations)and FTAA (Federation of Turkish Ammerican Associations) on one hand and TAA (Turkic American Assembly) on the other.
Focusing on belonging and identity policies specifically promoted by ATAA, the aim of this study is to reflect on the relationship between the making of hegemonic identities and identification strategies confronting official discourses and individual narratives about Turkish Americanness.
For this purpose I´ll present different kinds of data, the majority of which consists of qualitative interviews and field notes I collected in Washington DC among ATAA members during ethnographic fieldwork. Further data have been collected through a multimodal analysis of relevant materials published on the websites of the association.
The study contributes to the field of Turkish American studies, introducing a new perspective and presenting original data about relevant issues that are investigated here for the first time.
Bülent Arel and İlhan Mimaroğlu: Two Turkish Pioneers of Electronic Music Tuning the USA to the New World of Sounds
H. Alper Maral, Yıldız University
One of the first pictures documenting the “birth” of electronic music in the United States reflects a very remarkable and unique adiversity: Besides two female composers—still quite rare, then—and an American, there is an Argentinian, a Manchurian, a German and a Turkish composer, Bülent Arel—all pioneers in the field—shown together. Yet, not in the same picture, but having a larger impact and broader influence, another Turkish composer, İlhan Mimaroğlu, was fueling the new engine of roaring sounds from America. He built up a brand new musical culture of sounds never heard before, in a quite distinct epoch, in the middle of a period of tricky and dirty politics.
A Palazzo on the Bosphorus: The American Embassy in Beyoğlu
Louis Mazzari, Boğaziçi University
Throughout the era of Great Power diplomacy, from 1906 to 1937, the United States embassy to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire, and then to the Republic of Turkey, represented the United States from an opulent palace that crowned the crowded hilltop of Pera in the heart of the foreigner’s district of old Constantinople. The old empire was dying and being rebuilt, while a global power was emerging, and the two danced a strange and delicate pas de deux across the first third of the twentieth century through the grand hallway and oversized rooms of Palazzo Corpi, an ornate Italian mansion, under high-ceilinged, exuberant frescoes of mythological intrigue and romance.
While the Cold War was the era of closest alliance between Turkey and the U.S., the years between the two world wars was a crucial period for the two nations’ relations. This paper will examine aspects of that growing relationship by looking at the setting in which the American approach was conducted and at some of the personalities involved in relations during years and events equally as dramatic as the embassy’s operatic and rococo setting. Near the start of the Second World War, when the American delegation decamped for Ankara, the nations were firmly set on the path toward the alliance that would reach its apogee at the war’s conclusion.
The Turkish Diaspora in the United States: Immigration and Identity Formation
Fazia Meberbeche, Abu Bakr Belkaid University of Tlemcen-Algeria
People of Turkish origin from different national, ethnic, religious, and geographical backgrounds have been living in the United States since the 1820s, and are still integrating today. These Turkish migrations may be classified in three distinctive immigration waves: 1820-1921, 1950-70, and post-1970s. The motives behind each phase are rather complex and were led by economic, training, and educational considerations. Yet, very little is known about the history of these migrations as the Turkish-American community in the United States has largely remained unknown and undocumented.Very few studies have been undertaken about the historical integration patterns and cultural backgrounds of Turkish immigrants in the United States, until recently.
In this light, the present paper examines Turkish-American identity formation across generations. As the past always shapes the present, the paper begins with an overview of the history of Turkish immigration to the United States by analysing the main differences that existed between the three migration waves with regard to their acceptance and assertion of their American and Turkish identities. The paper then asks whether Turkish people of different historical, ethnic, geographical, and religious groups could give way to a shared cultural experience that would help construct the Turkish-American identities.
Eyes Wide Shut: Images of İstanbul in Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad
Erin Hyde Nolan, Boston University
The first edition of Mark Twain’s travelogue, Innocents Abroad: The New Pilgrims Progress (1869), juxtaposes the imagined and actual Ottoman worlds. Through word and image, Twain introduced America to an Istanbul that failed to fulfill his vision of the fantastical East. His Istanbul chapter illustrates a narrative of difference, for which he relied upon photographs from Ottoman firms. However, these images engender an explicitly local vision, and materialize imperial domains empty of exotica. Twain’s caustic account of Ottoman barbarism codes these documentary-style photographs,
positioning them, instead, as proof of otherness. Their appropriation demonstrates a dynamic of pictorial translation between East and West, and their journey from Istanbul to New York imitates the way in which they entered the suitcases of sightseers and, later, saturated the American visual economy. That Twain sought out the studio of Abdullah Frères, the official court photographers, for a portrait further underscores the manner in which photographs produced by Ottoman ateliers circulated back to the West. Innocents Abroad evinces photographic codification of the East, transforming an Ottoman reality into an American fantasy. My paper demonstrates how Twain’s visualization of Istanbul lodged in the American imagination, inverted Ottoman visual idioms, and fueled Eastern fantasies in the nineteenth century.
Ottoman Participation in the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition
Cafer Sarıkaya, Boğaziçi University
My paper examines Ottoman participation in the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Methodologically, the research adopts two primary sources, the Turkish Theatre: Souvenir Programme, and Musavver Şikago Sergisi, and also published memoirs of observers who witnessed the Exposition. The paper attempts to provide an overview of recent research on the analysis of the world’s fairs, where both theatricality of the overall event, and the accompanying Orientalist gaze have been analyzed. Given the fact that international exhibitions provided a certain architectural and theatrical representation capacity for the Orient, the paper attempts to understand how “Turkish Theatre” had been conceptualized for this event. Architecture provided an authentic setting and a visual summary of the represented culture displaying mosques, baths, caravanserais, cafés, houses and shops in a compact “pavilion”, where the presentation of everyday life was displayed through theatricality, dramatization of artisanship, display of regional and national costumes and of performances of theatre, ethnic music and local dances. The Turkish Theatre was directed by Pierre Butros Antonius, a Christian Arab from Mount Lebanon. There were 65 actors and actresses in total and 20 stockholders in the Ottoman theatre, all gathered by agents sent to different parts of the Empire to study the customs, manners and costumes and to engage these players from different cities of the Ottoman lands. Based on published reviews and memoirs, the paper attempts to historically visualize this unique Ottoman experience at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Terrible Turk Beaten: Fighting the Turkish Athletes during the Progressive Era
Emrah Şahin, University of Florida
On April 15, 1909, a Chicago Tribune article claimed that the Turks, “once called terrible,” lost that mere pseudonym” last night when Frank Gotch, a native American giant killer, retained the wrestling championship title by easily downing Yusuf Mahmud, the “Terrified Turk.” From the 1880s to the 1910s, the US media wrote extensively on scores of Turkish wrestlers in the United States. Their depiction of Turkish athletes was strikingly diplomatic, registering an ethno-cultural transformation of Turkish athletes from the ‘terrible’ to the ‘terrified.’ Using Ottoman journals along with American newspapers to construct a detailed historical narrative of Turkish sports activity across the United States, this presentation hopes to offer a glimpse of the complexity and contingency of the stereotypical world Turkish athletes inhabited. It shall challenge certain findings of Justin McCarthy’s The Turk in America by providing alternative on ways Turkish Image is constructed and consumed in the American context.
“We’re Still Living the Journey”: Media in the Daily Lives of Immigrants from Turkey
İlke Şanlıer Yüksel, Koç University
This paper focuses on Turkish immigrants’ daily use of media in the USA. Immigrants from Turkey living in the USA can be characterized as a “transnational community”. As such, they construct a diasporic space in which they live with an imagined belonging, which is particularly advocated by media messages. At the same time, the dynamics and networks of this cultural space are considerably different from those in Turkey. Therefore, looking at different forms of media use and cultural practices provides a useful method for analyzing the changing dynamics of identity formation within the transnational Turkish community.
My research is based on the premise that changes in both traditional and new media use since the late 1990s have been one of the most important factors in the transformation of the cultural space of Turkish immigrants in diaspora. Then I look at the implications of these new developments in media use for Turkish audiences in the USA. Based on in-depth interviews and ethnographic study conducted in New York and New Jersey, I discuss how media consumption patterns and production activities (trans)form Turkish immigrants’ cultural space in the diaspora. My findings reveal that the immigrants negotiate their hybrid identities in line with their cosmopolitan lives.