Yilmaz Guney’s cinematic career, from his first movie in 1958 to his death in 1984, does not only touch four important decades of Turkish cinema, but also is under the immense influence of Turkish political dynamics. Besides, Yilmaz Guney became a prominent figure for the Kurdish population in Turkey during their struggle against the Turkish state. This paper will investigate the Yilmaz Guney cult in Turkish Cinema with a constant reference to the perspective of minority studies. A regard to Guney’s cinema after 1970 will unfold many aspects of pacification of Turkish left as well as the formation of Kurdish identity. Yilmaz Guney was not only a member of an ethnic minority, but he was also a member of an ideological minority. His transformation from a movie star of box-office hits to a social realist director of intellectually and cinematically acclaimed films promises a detailed analysis of Turkish cinema during its heyday years, corresponding to late 60s and early 70s. Such analysis is even more intriguing when Guney’s Kurdish origins are taken into account. Guney proclaims himself as “an assimilated Kurd” located in a political environment dominated by military coups every ten years from 1960 to 1980. Given the fact that his main challenge with the authorities rose from his socialism advocacy, when did his “Kurdishness” become such an important issue or how important was it for his cinema? What can Guney’s cinema tell us about the turmoil that the society was going through and its aftermath? How did Guney engage with the political and legal constraints binding his artistic creativity? How should we interpret constraining Guney? Was it suppressing the left or oppressing the Kurds; both, or more? By juxtaposing cinema studies with minority studies, this paper also aims to contribute to the interdisciplinary theoretical debates revolving around questions of interpretation of various categories at the intersections of identity, politics, and artistic expression.

The rise of memory narratives such as oral histories, familial memories, testimonies, memoirs and witnessing accounts as opposing narratives against official historiographies coincide with the multicultural politics in Turkey. Investigating two distinguished Turkish-Armenian autobiographers, Migirdic Margosyan (1938-) and Takuhi Tovmasyan (1952-), in contemporary Turkish-Armenian literature with an emphasis on autobiographical writing during the last decade of twentieth century in Turkey show that their literary works are symptomatic of the epistemological shift in Turkey concerning how minorities, particularly Armenians, are finding their voices in public space since the dawn of 1990s within the politics of multiculturalism that has been experienced in Turkey since 1983. They both explore autobiographical writing as a medium to communicate minority and identity issues in Turkey and both write in the Turkish language for an intended Turkish audience. In order to find a medium with the Turkish audience they both explore the themes of memory, nostalgia, and loss within the politics of multiculturalism current in Turkey. It is arguable that Margosyan and Tovmasyan reflect these themes, which have been emerging gradually in modern Turkish literature, in their own works from an Armenian/minority point of view by appropriating and self-censoring their language in order to reach the Turkish audience without alienating that same audience with accusations of genocide. My objective is to explore Margosyan’s and Tovmasyan’s usage of these themes in their autobiographical writings by raising certain questions: Why are these two authors having an important impact on the Turkish audience not only within the realm of Armenian discourse but also in contemporary Turkish Armenian literature?; Why does their usage of memory, nostalgia and loss stand out as a reoccurring theme in their literary works instead of the commonly discussed views found in current genocide debates? My interest in Margosyan and Tovmasyan is in how their writing effects and exemplifies these shifts and also how their writing both resists the official homogenous Turkish national identity and shapes the current multiculturalist discourse in Turkey and Turkish literature. Unlike the political and historical approach to Armenian discourse currently in Turkey which circulates around the notion of “genocide,” Armenian authors seem to avoid the conceptualization of the word “genocide” and place more focus on the loss of the Armenian people in Anatolia, which becomes the central theme of their narrative strategies in order to point out the loss of diversity in geographical space and nostalgia for a so-called harmonious multicultural past.

In the 1990’s, after many years of silence and forgetting, Turkish literature has started to produce a significant number of works on the memory of the historical Armenian presence in pre-1915 Asia Minor and of the Armenian Genocide. This emergent literary production has been going hand in hand with some high profile literary court cases, those of writers who have been vocal about the need for the Turkish state to come to terms with its violent past, most popular two court cases being those of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak. In 2005, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was taken to court for declaring in an interview with the Swiss Newspaper Tages Anzeiger that many Kurds and Armenians were killed in Turkey “and nobody but [him] dares to talk about it.” Then, in 2006, novelist Elif ?afak similarly faced charges of “denigrating Turkishness” under the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. ?afak was charged for the publication of The Bastard of Istanbul, a novel that explores memory and the forgetting of the Genocide through following the history of four generations of a Turkish and an Armenian family. My paper examines the prospects and limitations of the literary figures’ involvement in creating a space to talk about the denial of historical violence and connectedly a space to discuss the ongoing state violence against minorities in Turkey. Among the questions I pursue are: Since literature in Turkey attempts to offer an alternative site of memory against the amnesia fostered by official historical accounts what kind of past/ memory is being constructed and how does this memory connect or make sense in the present? What does it mean to remember now and how does literature remember?

Being multilingual is rarely conceived as a social circumstance that “minoritizes” a person or community, nor one that places the speaking subject in an adverse or restrictive relationship toward a given species of social capital. Yet the historical trajectory of language policy in the Republic of Turkey, the broader nationalization strategies that have subtended it, and the sometimes spectral, sometimes hegemonic interferences of English, French, Arabic, Kurdish, Ottoman, Hebrew, and German—to name only a few—conspire to make certain kinds of multilingual subjectivity a quite complex civic affair, in the social worlds of twenty-first century Turkish youth. The title of this paper, “In Lingual Lockdown” was the phrase one multilingual teenager in this study used to describe his own experience of negotiating this prismatic landscape of linguistic allegiances in early twenty-first century Anatolia. In this, he echoed the sentiments of Ahmet Ha?im, who wrote the following in 1928: “For the last three days, while I write, I watch curiously the grappling of alien words with the new letters on the white page.” (“Lisan imar?.” Ikdam 3 Dec. 1928.) This empirical, qualitative study, based primarily on the insights of Turkish students at an English-medium university in Central Anatolia in 2008, attempts to highlight how “becoming multilingual” in twenty-first century Turkey (as in many other statutorily non-anglophone spaces around the planet) itself epitomizes a certain political and epistemic positioning, rather than merely a private, subjective process of learning. The Turkish teenagers surveyed in this paper theorize their learning of non-Turkish languages collectively, politically, and historically. “Learning languages” is, for them, an event that overlaps and jostles with other historical events—whether the 1980 coup d’etat, the European Union accession debates, the legacy of US and NATO influence, cultural globalization, or the strategic re-engineering of the Turkish language over the course of the previous century.

The five years between 1918-1923 is called Armistice Period in the history of Turkey, marking a liminal historical period, neither a part of the Ottoman Empire, nor, the beginning of the new Turkish Republic. In this study, what I am going to do is to explore the altering perceptions of Ahmed Emin (Yalman), who was a modernist journalist, over the non-Muslim minorities, namely, Jews, Armenians and Ottoman Greeks. As an intellectual receiving his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University in 1914, and who promotes the liberal and idealist views emanating from the U.S. and especially Woodrow Wilson, Ahmed Emin is an important figure in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republic period. In this paper, by close reading his editorials, which are more than seven hundreds, I will be trying to figure out his perception of non-Muslims as one of the most liberal-minded intellectual. Moreover, although he came from such an atmosphere of freedom and liberties, I will demonstrate that how he could be offensive against them, especially, Ottoman Greeks. Apart from these, this study will show the remarkable parallelism between the political events taking place in the region and the perceptions in the mind of an intellectual; as, both, an object of these incidents, and a subject of them being an actor in the scene, reporting and commenting the daily events. Consequently, the primal function of this study will be unpacking the chaotic mind of the late Ottoman intellectuals, which is the fundamental characteristic of this historical period, by exploring a great number of editorials, books and articles written by a modernist Ottoman intellectual. Furthermore, it will help understand the intellectual transformation in the subsequent years within a secular republic.