This paper complicates the post-colonial canon of gazing at representations and performances of modernity as platforms that primarily mirror the Western experience of order and truth for all audiences. The ways in which that order was generative of and dependent on the articulation of the Orient as the humiliated civilizational Other of Western modernity is a fundamental tenet of post-colonial theory. This is an indispensable but incomplete account of the reflexive platforms of modernity, because it does not cover the entirety of the representative and performative politics, ushered by a variety of official rationales and strategically employed in all geographies of modernity. In this paper, I argue that modernity as a discursive order of representations was a language spoken not only by colonial or enlightenment etymologies, but also by its very "others" to stake their own claims (not necessarily successfully), make their own cases (not necessarily rationally), and negotiate their own conflicts (not necessarily with emancipatory outcomes). Relying on contemporaneous periodicals, booklets, pamphlets, official correspondence and reports, I illustrate this argument by tracing the adaptations in self-representations of Ottoman technology across three world's fairs: the 1863 Istanbul General Exposition, the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition, and the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. In doing so, my aim is to enrich the role Mitchell's canonical "world-as-exhibition" plays in political theory from the viewpoint of the Oriental other's own rationale for and self-assessment in these platforms of—what seemed from certain angles as—competition, rather than spectacle: the "world-as-exhibitionism."

Sanayeh Garden was constructed in 1908 as a newly-built quarter of the Ottoman provincial capital of Beirut. It had, until the turn of the century, been an uninhabited expanse of dunes, notorious for frequently blowing sand into nearby neighborhoods and making inhabitants ill. The previous year, the Ottoman imperial government had opened a new vocational boarding school in this quarter to train poor, refugee, and orphaned children in traditional handcrafts and machine work and ensure their and the city’s future economic success. Its name in Turkish—sanayi mektebi, or industrial school—reflects the goals of imperial self-sufficiency and industrialization in the Late Ottoman period. Adjacent to the school and built simultaneously was Hamidiyye Hospital, named for the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II and intended to address the frequent and devastating cholera outbreaks that plagued Beirut. Both the vocational school and hospital were modern, global institutions that were realized physically in Beirut with features of eastern Mediterranean architecture—local stone, tiled roofs, oculi above rectangular windows, and porticos with thin columns separated by gothic arches. The school’s focus of industry was so pervasive that the garden in front of the two buildings and indeed the entire quarter came to be known as Sanayeh, which means industry in Arabic. As we can tell from photographs of the site, the garden was large and symmetrical, dotted with trees, lined with paths, and featured a bubbling fountain in the center, similar to contemporaneous gardens in major world cities. According to reformers of the era worldwide, such gardens with their greenery and fresh air were crucial to maintaining a healthy urban environment. Furthermore, public parks lent space to leisure activities such as strolls, which were particularly enjoyed by the emerging bourgeois class of Beirut. Through analysis of photographic and written documentation of the park, school, and hospital, this paper explores the dichotomies of imperial/provincial, health/illness, sanitation/dirtiness, work/leisure, and middle/working class that permeated Sanayeh. Some questions it addresses are: how did Abdülhamid II construct a public image as a benefactor of the unfortunate through building a new school and hospital? To what extent did the architectural style of the two buildings project a modern Ottoman, Arab, and/or Beiruti identity? How was this reflected in the everyday life of the space, such as in the vocational school’s curriculum? Thus this paper will demonstrate how modern science, moral reform, and industrialization shaped this rare well-preserved Ottoman quarter of Beirut.

Technology of cinema -as in other innovations and inventions- similar to photography, car, railway, telegraph, and telephone was the product of modern scientific research. Modernity within the context of early cinema may refer to various patterns of production, reception, or exhibition. Early cinema, thus, created new patterns for exhibition purposes that were different than other entertainments. “Movie Theater Wonders” explores how film exhibitions, cinema-going and cinema’s modern technology established a new type of spectacle culture and attempted to sustain a modernized infrastructure via the institutionalization of permanent movie theaters in imperial Istanbul. After the mid-1910s, the gradual increase of movie theaters in the capital caused immense infrastructural changes. Initiatives of foreign film companies and entrepreneurs as well as strategies and practices of the central government and municipal organizations established a new way of exhibition which was profitable for business and safe for audiences. These spatially bounded commercial venues, be them converted from theater buildings or other uses; and newly built ones specifically for film exhibition purposes, underwent changes. The threat of fire especially created concern among officials and fear among audiences. Air quality of the venues, heating, lighting, seating arrangements, exits, emergency precautions, and projector room specifications all had to meet new standards of modern amenities. Through analysis of municipal reports, newspaper articles, and memoirs, this paper suggests that movie theater exhibition practices were challenged by the unsettled issue of infrastructural inadequacy and technological needs within the larger process of Ottoman modernization. Early cinema exhibition in Istanbul was one of the aspects of urbanization, regulatory legislation and modern life at the turn of the century.

During the Turkish War of Independence, Turkish doctors faced two different but interconnected challenges: first, finding medical solutions to health problems in such a way that Turkish sovereignty could be sustained, that is to say with minimal interference from European countries, and second, working to eliminate the same sort of traditions and superstitions they believed characterized rural Anatolian attitudes towards science and medicine. The nascent Grand National Assembly, a body in which several doctors served as deputies, was one site where debates over medicine and modernity played out. In this paper, I explore the intense debates in the Assembly in 1920 over a draft for the Law for the Prevention and Containment of Syphilis (Frenginin Men-i Sirayet ve Inti?ar?n?n Tahdidi Kanunu), which mandated strictly regimented treatment for syphilis. The draft law ignited fierce debates over the powers and limits of doctors, the role that gender played in modern medicine, and what kind of role medical professionals were to play in a modern state during a historical moment of uncertainty. I argue that the debates reveal the wide role that doctors envisaged for themselves in the future – a role which received significant pushback from some conservative deputies. For the former group, modern medicine was a crucial site upon which the sovereign future of Turkey could be assured. I also argue that contours of modern medicine cannot be understood apart from gender. While the male members of the Assembly generally agreed that women’s bodies should be placed squarely under male expertise, but the questions of whose expertise and under what conditions men could assert their supposed knowledge illustrate the sharp divides over the potential and limits of modern medicine.

Founded in 1923, the Republic of Turkey tasked itself with forming a new Turkish nation, building upon the dynamics of the modernization efforts of the late Ottoman era. For the Kemalist elites, “reaching the level of modern civilizations”, per a popular motto of the time, would only be possible through secularization. The modern Turkish man and woman were primarily designed as urban middle-class model citizens, featuring a European outlook, from dress code to social etiquette. The making of the modern Turkish citizen as part of a modern nuclear family unit is reflected in the self-representations of family portraits in the 1920s and 1930s, giving us glimpses into the increasingly secularized public life and changing social landscape. Family pictures show us the ways in which the regime’s claims to modernity might have been negotiated and circulated in familial and collegial networks outside the realm of official media discourses. In this paper, through the study of vernacular photographs from the 1920s and 1930s, I examine how photographic production contributed to the production of modern urban Turkish middle-class femininities and masculinities in the founding years of the Republic, and how the newly minted citizens of a modern nation state made meaning out of the new regime.