Modern states tend to inscribe their power on the urban fabrics of their provinces, colonies and protectorates. In the process, colonial cities often became ‘laboratories of modernity.’ Our panellists, all young scholars of the modern Middle East, will discuss different aspects of colonial urbanism in Turkey and Palestine by primarily challenging Europe as the “home of modernity” and European colonial rule as an agent of modernization in various urban settings. Post World War I Middle Eastern nation-states used space, town planning and architectural forms as means of constituting certain inhabitants as “others.” Following Timothy Mitchell’s assertion that “the identity of the modern city is created by what it keeps out”, we will examine the ways in which the state and municipal officials operate to produce human elision, social containment and a culture of silences in urban space.
The scholars participating in this panel will offer different lenses to think about national space and its “others” across colonial borders and temporal divides: the first paper relates competition between Zionist and Palestinian trade fairs in 1930s Tel Aviv to the wider issues of burgeoning colonial-nationalism, capitalism and consumerism; the second paper argues that the inscription of neo-Ottomanism, as a manifestation of memory, heritage, and nostalgia, onto contemporary architecture in Istanbul needs to be read as contested space referential to shifting Turkish identity and geopolitical reconfigurations; the third paper visits the unrecognized Palestinian double-village of ‘Ayn-Hawd/`Ayn-Hawd al-Jadida in Israel and illustrates how Palestinians have attempted to undermine Zionist-colonial narratives surrounding their villages and their histories; The fourth paper on Diyarbakir, the “Kurdish capital” of “Eastern” Turkey, follows poetic & musical traces of Kurdish resistance to the physical and symbolic erasures of Kemalist urbanism.
By comparing these case studies, we aim to provide evidence of various counterspaces and forms of resistance to state- and consumer-driven gentrification and urban conservation. We propose to re-assemble competing memories, performative acts of remembrance (e.g. music and counter-exhibitions) and struggles over land- and design re-appropriation. In addition to questioning the colonial/postcolonial divide, our panel also challenges the urban-rural binary and the boundaries of area studies. Thus, by linking a Kurdish city, a Palestinian village, the former Ottoman capital, and the ”first Hebrew city”, we will engage in the recent debates over the relationship between nationalism and colonial rule, between the city and modernity, as well as between the local, regional, and global scale of inquiry.
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Dr. Susan Benson-Sokmen
Sounds of Silence?-Kurds in the Kemalist City
Prime Minister Erdo?an recently reminded protestors in Diyarbak?r, the “unofficial Kurdish capital,” that, in Turkey, there is still, “tek millet, tek bayrak, tek vatan, tek devlet”-one nation, one flag, one motherland, one state. The Turkish leader’s warning is an updated version of the phrase “tek dil, tek halk, tek bayrak”-one language, one people, one flag-that Kemalism has inscribed on mountains and public buildings throughout “Eastern” Turkey since 1923.
However, despite the embedding of Turkish “modernity” into the material environment and the simultaneous “destruction of historical artifacts or monuments that in anyway…indicated a Kurdish presence” (Zeydanl?o?lu forthcoming) in Turkey, 80 years after the formation of “modern” republic, 300 000 people attended Kurdish musician Ciwan Haco’s concert in Batman.
“Ciwan Haco vallahi geliyor,” (“finally, Ciwan Haco is coming”) announced the headline in the newspaper Radikal after the singer was given permission to “return” to Turkey. While Haco was born in Syria, and currently lives in Europe, his ancestral home is Mardin, a city approximately 100 kilometres southeast of Diyarbak?r. Haco’s song “Diyarbak?r Mala Mina” (“Diyarbak?r My Home”) has become the “unofficial” anthem of the “unofficial” Kurdish capital. In another song about the “Eastern” city, Haco sings:
I am the elder Sheikh Said and Sheikh Fuad
I am the unknown Kurdish fighter without name
I died for my country, I wasn’t born today
I carve my name on the wall of Diyarbak?r
By following Haco’s music as it “zigs and zags” its way through the “implacable” landscape of the Kemalist city, this paper argues that Kurdish aural resistance to the “hypervisuality” of Turkish nationalism (Houston 2008) has “carved” a space for Kurdish identity within the walls of the Kemalist city. While some scholars seek to make room for Kurds in the “cosmopolitan” city, I argue that as Kemalism’s “other victims”, Kurds use their voices not to “haunt” the city’s old European quarters but to resist current Kemalist urban planning projects. My examination of the Kurdish “soundscape” in Diyarbak?r, using Haco’s songs, YouTube images of the city during Newroz (Kurdish New Year), guerrilla music videos, the prison writings of Mehdi Zana, and oral history interviews, re-maps Diyarbak?r as a “counterspace” of Turkish “modernity.” In the process, my “aural” history of Diyarbak?r recasts the Turkish nation as an “object of contest, negotiation, and…struggle, both historically and in the contemporary moment” (Burton 2003).
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Dr. Noa Shaindlinger
The Levant Fair, which opened on April 26, 1934, was previously known as the Near East fair. However, by the early 1930s the fair had outgrown its previous venues, and the Tel Aviv municipality commissioned the planning and building of new and permanent fair grounds in an open (then) undeveloped area north of the city. Planning the new venue was entrusted to a group of architects, most of who migrated from Europe upon graduation from some of the famous faculties of architecture in Vienna, Rome, Dessau and Paris. El-Hanani, Kauffman, Sharon and their colleagues are credited for the transformation Tel Aviv was going through in the 1930s, when hundreds of modernist building facades (known today as the Bauhaus vernacular of the International Style) emerged all over the city, eventually granting Tel Aviv the status of a World Heritage Site by UNESCO several decades later, in 1994.
Rather than reading the fair as an extension of the city, I suggest to perceive Tel Aviv as an extension of the fair, not only through the victory of modernist architecture and the proliferation of International Style structures throughout the city, but rather, through the effect of the fair on the spectator. Following Timothy Mitchell, I claim that fairgoers’ perception of the world was altered: men and women who traveled though the world by proxy and viewed its wares classified and presented behind glasses, now left the fair back into the city to look at it as a much bigger exhibition; the white pavilions turned into the white city, streets into commercial areas, showcasing wares behind glasses and newly constructed department stores.
I therefore argue that the Levant Fair was a high modernist project and a dreamscape, a city within a city, and the triumph of a futuristic vision for a liberal, bourgeois and consumerist city, which also produced Tel Aviv (and by extension – Palestine) as a modern, European and exclusively Jewish colony, de-Arabized and western-oriented. But the fair was not just a self-congratulatory festival of hegemony. It was also a site of contestation: between empire and nationalist interests, elites and (working class) masses, between rival political ideologies and between traders and exhibitors competing for consumers’ attention and wallets. Despite its official claim for cohesion, the Levant Fair was therefore a free market of wares, ideas and social roles.
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Mr. Mathew Gagne
Memories of the Ottoman past have become a site of contestation in Turkey today – as contextualized by articulations of memory, heritage, and nostalgia. They have been appropriated and employed by competing groups to advance their own agenda and version of modernity and Turkish national history. This paper examines the emergence and application of neo-Ottomanism as a political and social discourse that attempts to infuse/reconcile contemporary political and social discourses in Turkey with their Ottoman past. The basic question addressed is: how is the past (re)constructed, interpreted/contested, articulated, and manifested in the present? The rise of Neo-Ottomanism is examined within a framework of the convergence of politics, tourism, and global economics/consumer culture. I link neo-Ottomanism with four distinct periods of the Ottoman Empire – the Golden Age, the reform periods of the Tulip Age and the Tanzimat, and the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II. I examine the application of neo-Ottomanism within the past two decades, specifically during the transformation of Istanbul into a global capitalist city. This is contextualized by discussing this transformation in relation to memories of the Empire as ‘multicultural’ and Islamic. Finally, I argue that the global identity of Istanbul is inextricably linked with the Ottoman past. I examine three events and site upon and within which manifestations of the articulations of memory, heritage, and nostalgia have become inscribed: 1) the 1996 United Nations Conference for Human Settlement, 2) the 1994 election of the Islamic Refah party to the Istanbul municipal government, and 3) the fate of the palaces as commodified and museumified for the tourist gaze. I attempt to illustrate the complex and overlapping processes occurring by which memories, heritage, and nostalgia become employed in contemporary Turkish discourse and inscribed, physically and symbolically, onto the Ottoman monuments in Istanbul.
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Mr. Oscar Jarzmik
Muhammad Abu al-Hayja is a resident of ‘Ayn Hawd al-Jadida, an ‘unrecognized’ Palestinian village that sits atop Jabal al-Wustani on Mount Carmel in Israel. When asked by filmmaker Rachel Leah Jones in 2001 about the structure of the village mosque, Abu al-Hayja explained, “…we built the mosque in the new ‘Ayn Hawd with a tall minaret so we would be visible from the trees, so people will know that there are Arabs living here” (Leah Jones 2001). This insistence on being seen emerges constantly in press releases and interviews with residents from the ‘unrecognized’ Palestinian villages, articulated with a sense of urgency that makes obvious the existence of forces seeking to expel them from sight and mind. With a focus on ‘Ayn Hawd al-Jadida, as well as the ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin villages of al-Naqab, This paper will examine the forces at work against this category of villages, where residents have struggled against a double-negation stemming from the strategies and master-narratives of both the state and neighboring Jewish colonies. Taking a cue from Susan Slyomovics’ landmark study "The Object of Memory," I will examine cartography, the deprivation of services, ‘folk narratives’ of origin, the activities and structures supporting the tourist economy, and even planting as tools for exercising dominance over the ‘unrecognized.’ However, this study will not assume a passive subject but stress the individual capacity to manipulate and even destabilize these schemes, thereby framing the villages as spaces that embody the tensions of power relations.
It will be shown how residents of the unrecognized villages actively ‘invade’ colonial narratives of erasure from more surreptitious forms, such as return visits to their original homes/sites and counter-mapping, to organized grass-roots action that directly addresses and challenges the policies of the state. By examining the tactics used by residents of the unrecognized villages in resisting domination, it will be shown that the totalizing power of state projects may be overestimated.
