How were racialized characteristics inscribed upon diverse bodies in the late Ottoman Empire? De-colonizing studies by Makdisi (2000) and Deringil (2003) explore the late Ottoman process of colonizing border areas via political implementation of racial hierarchies. Ergin (2008) inquiries into the Ottoman legacies of Turkish racial categorizations, noting the tenacious links from past administrative practices into the modern mono-ethnonational Turkish state. This paper expands on these insights by enquiring into the cultural forms and representations that supported bureaucratic policies. I claim that the durability of racial categories is due to cultural practices that replicated past ideologies. This presentation explores cultural representation of Roman (“Gypsy”) communities in literature, poetry, plays and musical forms in order to dig into the practices of exclusion by interrogating the workings of imperial and ethno-national internal colonialism. The segregationist model of the Ottoman Empire hyper-marked difference for biopolitical control via bureaucratic specialization. The subsequent Turkish Republic utilized Western European forms of internal colonialism through cultural production. Indications of Western European imported racializations appear in 19th century literature and popular forms alongside Ottoman-styled caricatures, such as the Romani “dark girl” and “dark-eye”. The subsequent Turkish Republic secured biopolitical control by attempting to erase ethnic, linguistic and religious difference to claim a “singular” Turkish identity. Such techniques are evident in state curation practices of national “folk songs” in which the ethnic, linguistic and religious identities of “source people” are erased while their products are celebrated as regional musical representations of a purported unified state. In the state-defined forms of classical music, musicologists, musicians and state agents promoted the Turkish-ness of Ottoman music in the 1940s-1950s while hyper-marking Armenian, Greek, Jewish and Romani compositions and performing style as heretical, thus re-making Ottoman court and urban traditions into a purported singular Turkish ethnic classical tradition. The legacy of these musical practices along with continued exclusionary policies in contemporary Turkey signify the existence of taken-for-granted practices of racial marking, pointing to new pathways to engage a critical post-colonial theory that does not conflate Western European forms of racial colonization with other long-standing colonial practices, such as that of the Ottoman Empire.