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Theater, Memory, and the Transformation of the Alevi Community
Abstract by Rüya Kalıntaş On Session IV-14  (Memory and Living History)

On Tuesday, November 12 at 2:30 pm

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
How does a traumatic event that transforms a minoritarian community’s political life gain new lives in theater? How do such theater productions become a site for social and historical justice efforts? Combining ethnographic and archival research, my presentation will explore these questions by focusing on the Alevi religious minority in Turkey and the Sivas Massacre of 1993. I will examine how these productions mobilize affect by immersing the audience in the collective traumatic experience, and encourage them to become agents of change in the present. The community collectively referred to as “Alevis” makes up the largest religious minority in Turkey. After the Sunni Muslim Ottoman rulers asserted caliphal authority in the early sixteenth century, the Alevi minority was marked as the enemies within. In 1923, the Republic of Turkey was founded as a secular nation-state. Nevertheless, the Alevi community’s experiences of citizenship and belonging remained precarious. The nation-state marginalized Alevis through incursions into their rituals, insinuations of heresy, and permission to societal violence targeting the community. The regime thus endeavored to assimilate Alevis into the normative Sunni Muslim and Turkish national identity. The waves of migration beginning in the 1950s gradually resulted in the urbanization and transnationalization of the Alevi community. As they settled in urban centers in Turkey and across Europe, theater became a site where Alevi people explored their everyday experiences of oppression and discrimination. This cultural expression was dramatically underscored by the events of July 1993, when thirty-three people died in a mob arson conducted by radical Sunni Islamists at a hotel accommodating attendees of an Alevi cultural gathering in the city of Sivas. Authorities declared that the incident was not a deliberate attack against Alevis. Despite numerous trials, no one was held accountable. While this was not the first instance of violence against the community, it fundamentally transformed their political life. Alevis, who had largely maintained a discreet stance and refrained from voicing their demands, began to openly assert their identities and advocate for the recognition of their beliefs through their international networks. Theater and performance played a central role in this period of transformation. The performances facilitated political struggle while transmitting and transforming the community’s historical traumas. The case of Alevi theater demonstrates how minoritarian theater practices facilitate the constitution of postmemory and the intergenerational transmission and transformation of trauma during times of sociopolitical transformation, and how these dynamics serve the struggle for social and historical justice.
Discipline
Interdisciplinary
Geographic Area
Anatolia
Europe
Ottoman Empire
Turkey
Sub Area
None