This essay will address the history of the place of women in the development of public transit in Istanbul. It will consider the way in which the tramway constituted a public space in which modernist conceptions regarding the role of women in society had to be reckoned with differently than in other public spaces. Instances of this reckoning are found through a wide variety of sources from government agreements, the press, memoirs, cartoons and literature from the tramway’s founding documents in 1869 up through the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1922. The significance of the tramcar as a public space in this period is twofold. First, it was a rare space where Ottomans, and later Turkish republican citizens, would encounter each other on an intimate level, crowding onto platforms and jamming into cars, negotiating personal space, and by extension public mores, on a daily basis. This crowding created a public anxiety about whether the government or the French company controlling the tramcars was capable of properly managing a space that seemed to be increasingly lawless. The second level of significance of the tramcar is the fact that while it was a crowded and intimate space, it was also a segregated one. Until 1924 women and men were seated in opposite spaces, usually the same space separated by a fabric curtain or in rare cases on separate floors of double-decker tramcars, and this generated a further amount of public anxiety regarding male-female relations in the public sphere. Whereas the debate about women’s roles in Ottoman and Turkish republican society played out mostly in the discursive arena of the press, the tramcar was a space in which citizens had to come face to face, quite literally, with the condition of modernity. Drawing from the theoretical work of literature scholar Lauren Berlant, I suggest the tramcar as a public space provoked intense emotional feelings of belonging and desire, often through the confrontation with consumer choices. In this way the contrived space of the tramcar made for explicit and intense interaction between everyday consumers that differed from those that might be had at a greater distance on a boulevard or in a park. This essay will also relate directly to literature on the changing role of Beyo?lu as a site of culture production from the Ottoman to Republican period, since it was a hub for the tramway and modern, western fashion and culture.

The historic entanglement of the novel as a literary genre with the spread of modern discourses and practices makes novels an invaluable source. The modern discourses on work and the literary imagination of the Ottoman novels mutually reinforced the contemporary consensus on new ethical worlds, while establishing new forms of difference. This paper will explore how Ottoman novels described and prescribed new forms of subjectivity through the perspective of work ethos and productivity of the new self. The Ottoman reformist anxiety about Ottoman laziness as a social disease takes a different and multifaceted form in the novels of the reform period. By concentrating on Ahmed Midhat’s Karnaval (1881) and Mehmet Murat’s Turfanda mi Yoksa Turfa mi (1891), a few questions will be addressed. First, through these novels, how did the Ottoman literary practices articulate new conceptualizations of subjectivity in connection with the nation? The Ottoman novels constructed the ideal self by juxtaposing it to a new typology in the literary realm, the much ridiculed anti-hero zuppe. How do the novels that feature the zuppe character thematize the period’s preoccupation with work ethos in connection with character and nation building? Does ridicule serve a “function of preserving social norms,” or does it promote a new set of mores that have been increasingly ubiquitous in the social sphere? Contrary to earlier analyses, the zuppe was not a person who merely imitated. Just like the Ottoman novels, the character of the zuppe should not be imprisoned into an imitation-originality binary. The specifics of each novel they appear in withstanding, the zuppe characters indicate the establishment of difference. How does this difference, explored in the literary realm, resonate with the larger social and political anxieties of the Ottoman reform period? By creating a dandy-like idle figure as an anti-hero, the novelists not only articulated what was a social reality, but also disarticulated from it by prescribing a certain citizen type and ridiculing others before an audience they helped create by targeting them as interlocutors of their texts. The discussion should leave the preoccupation with wrong Westernization paradigm, and should address how articulation of new forms of subjectivity, embodied in the hard-working hero and the unproductive anti-hero, presented different models of modernities, political propositions, and anxieties.

Despite continuous attempts to annul it, the Ottoman hour system, known as gurubi saat or alaturka saat outlived the empire. In fact, it remained widely used even after it was outlawed in 1925. The proposed presentation suggests an ‘emotional explanation’ to the resilience of the alaturka system in the last Ottoman decades. The study of temporality in recent years has demonstrated the intricate ways through which the socio-political order shapes prevalent uses and understandings of time, which in turn serve to stabilize the socio-political order. The alaturka hour system was not exceptional in this respect. Yet, I argue that in order to reach a better understanding of Ottoman temporality, of any temporality, we must go beyond questions of power. If the alaturka system was a conceptual cage that reflected and served the power structures that created it, for many people it was a home they were reluctant to leave. It was a system that underpinned a way of life and abandoning it raised profound anxieties. As author Ahmed Ha?im (d. 1933) has written in his famous ‘Muslim Clock’: “Those old hours marked the death of our fathers, the wedding days of our mothers, our own births, the departure of caravans and the conquest of enemy cities. The foreign hours which replaced them upset our lives, resetting them according to an unknown code of laws, and making them unrecognizable to our spirits.” In short, what I seek to explain is not so much what people thought about time but how they felt about it. These feelings, I argue, explain the longevity of the alaturka system no less than rationalized ideological debates in the parliament, or in the press. In order to sketch the contours of late Ottoman urban routines and the way they conformed to the alaturka system, I rely on a wide set of sources, from archival documents, through newspapers and on to personal narratives. I then identify these same contours in contemporary novels and short stories in an attempt to identify recurring ‘emotional scripts’ that were associated with specific time-related practices (such as setting the clocks at sunset). I conclude by demonstrating how these emotions were played out in the struggle between the forces that sought to annul the alaturka system, and those who rose to defend it.

Discourses on the Soul in the Late Ottoman Empire In parallel with the diversification of Ottoman intellectual life in the Second Constitutional Era (1908 – 1918) discussions on psychology were carried out by Ottoman intellectuals from different political and religious backgrounds, such as progressivism, Islamism, materialism, and spiritualism. Intellectuals articulated a variety of ideas on the definition, nature, and use of psychology which were in tandem with the changes in cultural, political, and social areas. As Ottoman intellectuals envisioned a comprehensive social transformation and discussed the limits of modernization as well as the role of religion in a future society, the components of human nature remained controversial. The opposition between materialism and spiritualism and the mechanistic view of human nature constituted the backbones of the controversy. This paper is concerned with the changes within the intellectual discourses on the soul in the Ottoman Empire from 1908 and 1923. It studies the criticisms to the mechanistic view of human nature, nourished by Sufism and Bergsonian Spiritualism, via early books and journal articles on psychology. Broadly it aims to contextualize the debate between materialism and spiritualism within the larger global framework of science and religion to question in what ways Ottoman intellectuals contributed to this theme. It ultimately discusses the questions how the concept of soul was designated and framed by Ottoman intellectuals in relation to the concepts of selfhood, liberty, free-will, love for the nation, divine love; and to what extent the literature on the soul can be seen as a criticism of homogenization, submersion of the self in the collective and ultimately Ottoman / Turkish top-down modernization.