Evaluating Andreas Huyssen’s claim that “mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project,” this paper examines Nezihe Muhiddin’s İstanbul’da bir Landru (A Landru in Istanbul, 1934) in light of the modernism and mass culture debates of the late twentieth century. Taking its title character from Henri Landru, the French serial killer who seduced and murdered ten women he met via advertisements in the lonely hearts section of Parisian newspapers, Muhiddin ’s novella follows the relationship between Nazlı, a young Turkish princess, and Nils, a Danish artist living in Turkey. When Nazlı discovers that Nils is the killer of five Istanbul women, he is revealed as the Landru of Istanbul. The novella’s use of gothic literary tropes and the presence of Landru, who was fetishized in press coverage of his murder trial, both point to Muhiddin’s familiarity with the popular literary conventions and mass media culture of Europe. Yet, Muhiddin’s implementation of the formal conventions of mass culture within the novella suggests a politically subversive intent that highlights and critiques the subordinate position of women within Turkish society, an act that aligns her writing with the modernist literary experiments of women writers in the Anglophone context such as Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf. This paper argues that Muhiddin’s novella is an extension of her feminist political vision, and as such sheds a complicated light on the twentieth century debates over the separation between a mass culture defined as feminine, and a modernist literary culture associated with a male elite. In a country where literacy was largely a skill of the urban and male population, and was estimated at between 10 and 15 percent of the population between 1927 and 1933, how can one understand the idea of mass literature as a feminine endeavor in Turkey? Given the novel’s status in Turkey as a civilizing instrument within the discourse of Westernizing reform, how could Muhiddin’s novella be situated within larger nineteenth and twentieth century discourses that link mass literature to the decline of civilization and culture via capitalism? Furthermore, given Muhiddin’s leadership of the Osmanlı Kadın Fırkası (Ottoman Women’s Party), her editorship of Türk Kadını, and her extensive activism for women’s rights, how might her political roles be understood to inform and engage with her authorship of women’s fantasy fiction? Finally, what light can Muhiddin’s novella shed on the modernist project in Turkey?

This paper explores İkinci Yeni, or the Second New, a Turkish poetic current that emerged in the mid-1950s and is typically associated with the poets Edip Cansever, Turgut Uyar, Cemal Süreya, İlhan Berk, Ece Ayhan, and Sezai Karakoç. The playful, experimental, and often obscure poetry of the Second New (SN) has alternately been described as “neo-surrealist,” “modernist,” and “avant-garde.” However, it is essential to distinguish between these movements. Each had a different relationship to politics, mass culture, high art, and literary/artistic institutions. I argue that the SN is best understood as modernist, as evidenced by its temporal self-understanding. According to Orhan Koçak, the SN must be seen within a tradition of modern Turkish poetry that since the nineteenth century has witnessed “successive outbursts of the New, with the ‘Second’ New as the last and the most drastic one in a long line of such breakthroughs.” The participation of the SN in the logic of innovation, the historical break, and the injunction to “make it new” reveals the close connection between modernism and the project of modernity. Further, following Gregory Jusdanis’ notion of “belated modernity,” I argue for the SN as an example of belated modernism. Scholarship on Euro-American modernism has focused mainly on texts within a standard periodization of roughly 1890-1945. Outside of hegemonic contexts modernism continues into the 1950s/1960s. As Frederic Jameson asserts, even after modernism become canonized in Europe and North America “the older forms of high modernism may still retain something of the subversive power they have lost elsewhere.” The condition of possibility for modernism was incomplete modernization and “the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history.” Certainly this situation continued to characterize Turkey into the 1960s, with increasing yet incomplete industrialization, the coexistence of rural squalor and modern cities, subterraneously surviving Ottoman cultural traditions and a thriving cultural industry—all of which was symbolized by the shantytowns ringing Turkey’s major metropolises. SN poetry reflects and engages these ambiguities and contradictions. Additionally, I locate the SN within a context of 1960s decolonization, Third Worldism, and global protests by workers and students. As Perry Anderson has argued, modernism was made possible by “the imaginative proximity of social revolution,” a condition that had its “after-glow” in 1968 in places like Turkey. The language of SN poetry, I argue, is that of a subject on the brink of imminent self-invention and a society facing the possibility of revolution.

During the decades of the 1950s and 60s Turkey experienced not only fundamental political transformations, including the transition to a multi-party system and the 1960 military coup, but also a dynamic artistic scene. Along with a general trend toward the rapid expansion of the metropolitan and provincial press, literary and aesthetic journals also proliferated during this period and offered a forum for the publication of modern literature, artwork, and musical scores as well as for the discussion and promotion of political and aesthetic ideologies. In addition, prestigious publications including Varlık as well as more marginal journals such as Yeditepe began to produce annuals that provided yearly overviews of the prevailing aesthetic debates and artistic accomplishments and sought to locate Turkish aesthetics on a local and global level. Scholars, such as Daniel Lerner, associated this growth in print media specifically with Kemalist nation-building and modernization reforms and as evidence that Turkey was developing along a prototypical Western model; however, these aesthetic periodicals and annuals through their representations of aesthetic modernism (in literature, art, and debates) negotiated and often contested Turkish nationalism and modernization and approached aesthetics within the immediate context of Turkey and the greater Cold War era world. The frequent imprisonment of artists and editors, the disruption of publication, and legislative efforts by the political elite to control content manifest the perceived challenge presented by these myriad periodicals to the projects of national and political modernization. This paper examines the convergence of modernization, modernity, and aesthetic modernism in the form of Turkish periodicals and annuals published from 1950 to 1965. As primarily market driven publications with occasional political affiliations, to what extent did aesthetic periodicals provide an alternative to Turkey’s political and economic modernization? How did the editors, authors, and artists determine and represent aesthetic achievements and contemporary debates? How and why was modernist literature and art promoted to target audiences, such as mothers in the case of the journal Aile, as an essential path to modernity for the contemporary Turkish nuclear family? Finally, how did periodicals and annuals as a popular medium for artistic expression and consumption determine aesthetic modernism in twentieth century Turkey?

This paper argues that early jazz culture in interwar Constantinople provides a cue to consider the ways that the transnational movement of early jazz engages with the question of aesthetic modernism. Jazz culture—defined as nightlife, music, dance performance, and illustrated print culture that sketch out a new set of social mores, fashions, gender relations, and consumer practices—provides a cue: (1) to consider the parameters of early jazz Turkish criticism, and (2) to establish a specific jazz chronology that allows for revisiting late-Ottoman and early Turkish republican frameworks to the project of republican modernism. Specifically, I understand jazz culture as intersecting with experiences that expands what some scholars call a “transatlantic framing” for reading the meanings and production of modern bodies and practices (Daphne Brooks: 2006). Constantinople’s early jazz scene coalesced during the years surrounding World War One when U.S. amateur musician-sailors joined a circuit of black performers that connected key cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean and continental Europe, highlighting a performance circuit of black artists to the city that began in the mid-nineteenth century. By the occupation period (1918-1923), “Constan Town,” as penned by U.S. writers, captured the city’s emerging 1920s jazz scene. In 1927 African-American trombonist and composer Earl B. Granstaff who had performed before U.S. and Turkish dignitaries in Constantinople remarked to a New York Amsterdam News correspondent that black musicians were “occupying more and higher positions in Constantinople than in any other place.” This culture was shaped by and reflected the overlapping diasporas and migrations of refugees, musicians, minority communities, many of whom were part of a growing commercial sector of ethnic and foreign entrepreneurs. Drawing upon foreign and Ottoman press, travel narratives, diaries, and visual materials, this paper briefly sketches the early jazz scene of performance and then isolates post-Ottoman observer’s perspective on a jazz of questionable origins, of primitivism and potential savageness, and of something uncomfortably modern. The framing of early jazz and its dances as savage and as ultra-modern carves out a space to consider the relationship between jazz culture, meanings of blackness, and the experience of modernism. “Riffing to the Modern” centers around the central question: how can the constitutive parts of jazz culture help frame a transnational perspective for engaging with early republican modernism that disrupts a chronology of cultural reforms and debates of cultural lacks?