Mavi Boncuk |
Documenting the Past and Publicizing Personal Stories: Sensescapes and the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey
Asli Iğsiz
From: Journal of Modern Greek Studies
Volume 26, Number 2, October 2008 | pp. 451-487 | 10.1353/mgs.0.0035
National identification practices and nationalist historiography in Turkey have long focused on erasing differences and diversity and configuring a “homogeneous” nation. More recently, an increasing personalization of geography through familial attributes and memories became an anchor for self-identification in contemporary Turkey, traceable through family history and personal narratives in the public domain. This shift in the way people engage with the past is symptomatic of nostalgia for a traceable self-identification through family histories pursued to geographies of “origin” as opposed to the “administered forgetting” of such identifications by nationalist ideologies. We can track this change over the last two decades in cultural products, such as documentary novels, memoirs, and family cookbooks, which have opened a space in the public domain to reconsider the past and to rewrite history at an individual level. The dynamics of this change are particularly evident in the case of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange and its representation in Kemal Yalçın’s documentary novel, The Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange (Emanet Çeyiz).
See also: History, Memory and the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange: But the memory remains more by Aytek Soner Alpan
Asli Igsiz | The Hagop Kevorkian Center[1]
Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Ph.D., University of Michigan, Comparative Literature
M.A., University of Michigan, Near Eastern Studies
M.A., Hacettepe University, French Literature
B.A., Bogaziçi University, Foreign Language Education
Areas of Research/Interest
Nineteenth and twentieth-century literary cultures and cultural representation in the Ottoman State, Turkey, Greece, and France; cultural history and memory; minority cultures, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism; governmentality; forced migration; comparative methodologies; multidisciplinary epistemologies.
[1] The Hagop Kevorkian Center[*] for Near Eastern Studies at New York University was created in 1966 to foster the interdisciplinary study of the modern and contemporary Middle East and to enhance public understanding of the region. The Kevorkian Center's activities focus on the histories, politics, economies, religions, cultures and languages of the area stretching from North Africa to Central Asia.
[*] Sibel Erol
Clinical Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Ph.D. 1993, University of California, Berkeley.
Office Address: Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies 50 Washington Square South New York, NY 10012
Email: sibel.erol@nyu.edu
Documenting the Past and Publicizing Personal Stories: Sensescapes and the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey
Asli Iğsiz
From: Journal of Modern Greek Studies
Volume 26, Number 2, October 2008 | pp. 451-487 | 10.1353/mgs.0.0035
National identification practices and nationalist historiography in Turkey have long focused on erasing differences and diversity and configuring a “homogeneous” nation. More recently, an increasing personalization of geography through familial attributes and memories became an anchor for self-identification in contemporary Turkey, traceable through family history and personal narratives in the public domain. This shift in the way people engage with the past is symptomatic of nostalgia for a traceable self-identification through family histories pursued to geographies of “origin” as opposed to the “administered forgetting” of such identifications by nationalist ideologies. We can track this change over the last two decades in cultural products, such as documentary novels, memoirs, and family cookbooks, which have opened a space in the public domain to reconsider the past and to rewrite history at an individual level. The dynamics of this change are particularly evident in the case of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange and its representation in Kemal Yalçın’s documentary novel, The Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange (Emanet Çeyiz).
See also: History, Memory and the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange: But the memory remains more by Aytek Soner Alpan
Asli Igsiz | The Hagop Kevorkian Center[1]
Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Ph.D., University of Michigan, Comparative Literature
M.A., University of Michigan, Near Eastern Studies
M.A., Hacettepe University, French Literature
B.A., Bogaziçi University, Foreign Language Education
Areas of Research/Interest
Nineteenth and twentieth-century literary cultures and cultural representation in the Ottoman State, Turkey, Greece, and France; cultural history and memory; minority cultures, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism; governmentality; forced migration; comparative methodologies; multidisciplinary epistemologies.
[1] The Hagop Kevorkian Center[*] for Near Eastern Studies at New York University was created in 1966 to foster the interdisciplinary study of the modern and contemporary Middle East and to enhance public understanding of the region. The Kevorkian Center's activities focus on the histories, politics, economies, religions, cultures and languages of the area stretching from North Africa to Central Asia.
[*] Sibel Erol
Clinical Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Ph.D. 1993, University of California, Berkeley.
Office Address: Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies 50 Washington Square South New York, NY 10012
Email: sibel.erol@nyu.edu