When Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson’s “Tableau General de L’Empire Othoman” (TGEO) was printed in 1784, this cultural and historical account of the Ottoman Empire was one of the first ones written by a native author. Building on Hayden White’s conceptualization of historical narrativity, this paper explores the complex interweaving of moralizing storytelling and historical claims-making in TGEO, and it argues that this interweaving allows d’Ohsson to transform his precarious nativeness as an Ottoman-Armenian translator for the Swedish Embassy into a source of epistemological authority. Although d’Ohsson asserts that his knowledge of Ottoman history and customs is much more truthful than many of his European contemporaries throughout the TGEO, he remains ambivalent about his nativeness throughout the work. In the introduction, for instance, he states that as a person “born in Constantinople, raised in the same country, and attached all [his] life to the service of a Court tied intimately to the Sublime Porte” he has “more than anyone else the means to overcoming these difficulties [in accessing the knowledge of the Ottomans].” Yet, he also calls his talents “weak” and “unsophisticated.” How does d’Ohsson reconcile admitting to his own inadequacy as a scholar with the claim that he is better equipped than anyone else to overcome the difficulties of knowing the nation of the Ottomans? To what extent does the genre of “tableau” enable such reconciliation? Contrasting the textual instances in which d’Ohsson constructs his nativeness as a source of epistemological authority with his appeals to “Enlightened Europe,” this paper explores how educated members of religious and ethnic minorities within the Ottoman Empire were seeking to cope with the increasing institutional hostility they were experiencing. First, it contextualizes d’Ohsson’s life and work within the developments of the late eighteenth century. While the Ottoman Empire was becoming increasingly interested in the manners of the Europeans, the economic and political tensions within the Empire were creating sharp cleavages between Muslims and non-Muslims, along with revolts that were conservative. Then, the paper turns to the text of TGEO, and examines how the interaction between d’Ohsson’s authorial position and his use of narrative tropes allows him to formulate a critique of the exclusionary violence of the Empire’s recent sociopolitical transformations. Finally, the paper discusses the limitations of TGEO in offering a critique of political exclusion by studying the ways in which d’Ohsson relies heavily on tropes of progress and decline.

The official line regarding Turkey’s involvement in the World War II has been one of impartiality. But the rise of fascism in Europe had definite echoes in Turkish social and political landscapes that proved disastrous for Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities. One would expect the anti-Semitic acts of violence perpetrated in 1934 in Thrace would force the Turkish government to instill stronger security measures to protect its non-Muslim citizens but the exact opposite came to pass. First, in April 1941 non-Muslim men aged between 27 and 40 were conscripted for reserve military service even if they have already enlisted before. The soldiers in the labor battalions were sent to remote places in Anatolia to do physically intensive and extremely demanding construction jobs while receiving no payments for their labor. The horrible living conditions were coupled with epidemics and malaria constituted a major problem. The second was the infamous Wealth Tax [Varlik Vergisi]. Rifat Bali, an independent scholar, describes it as: "It was originally conceived as a tool for taxing the extreme wealth being made through wartime profiteering and black market operations in Turkey during the Second World War. In practice, however, it was imposed in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion, in essence representing a sort of ‘economic warfare’ carried out by the Turkish regime against the country’s non-Muslim population." Most non-Muslims saw all of their assets being appropriated by the state and those who could not pay the exorbitant tax were sent to labor camps in Askale, Erzurum in Eastern Anatolia. This paper deals with the literary representations of these events in Turkish literature, looking at how these works provide an alternative, counter history to the official line by comparing and contrasting the works of minority authors to Turkish authors, and works from the time of these events to more contemporary works.

This paper considers representations of state violence in Orhan Pamuk’s Kar (Snow)(2002). Part of a larger project focusing on representations of state violence in twentieth century Turkish and Spanish literature, this paper argues that Snow puts forth a strong critique of the Turkish nation-state, especially through its portrayal of the Turkish State as inherently and purposefully violent. I am especially interested how the novel conveys this particular criticism. I focus on the notion of reenactment as a significant representational technique in Snow, which foregrounds repetition as an important feature of state-violence. Using Sibel Irzik’s idea of self-conscious allegories, I discuss the allegorical impulse in Snow as performing and reenacting the tensions implicit in the Kemalist project of Westernization, making staged performances significant instruments in the narrative. Reenactment appears in the staged performances in the novel, especially in the staging of a mini-coup during a theater play glorifying the secular Turkish Republic as a harbinger of civilization and enlightenment. This violent performance is a moment of confusion between fiction and reality, in which the performance on stage exceeds the bounds of the theater and spills into reality, representing and at the same time perpetrating violence. In other words, it is a moment of simultaneous repetition and creation. The performance of the coup on stage is a reenactment and, to a certain extent, a repetition of the coups in Turkish history. The reactions from the audience and the habitants of the city are also repetitions of their past reactions to coups, which introduces the peculiar idea of “coup rituals” in Turkish society. As a result, the reenactment embedded in the performance highlights the repetitive aspect of state-violence. But the performance is also a production, one that engenders new moments of violence. In the process of reenacting violence, the play perpetrates that violence once again, this time in a new context, with new actors. Thus, the performance of state violence in Snow is repetition and novelty all at once. I argue that this particular type of performance marks the critical impetus in the novel, because it postulates the violence of the Turkish state as an ongoing project of violence. Finally, I suggest that this moment of simultaneous reenactment (a repetition) and perpetration (a new instance of violence) can be useful also as a means to think about the ethical implications of representing violence.

Among the reforms that the Kemalist elite undertook in the construction of the Turkish Republic were the Turkish Alphabet Reform implemented in 1928, which posited the adoption of the Latin alphabet instead of the Ottoman; and the Language Reform in 1932, which aimed to rid Turkish of vocabulary and linguistic structures that derived from other languages. These reforms aimed not only to create a national language that would unify the citizens of Turkey, but also to homogenize the population and erase ethnic differences of various minority groups. While the historical, social and political impact of these reforms are very significant and have been widely debated by scholars, politicians and the general public alike, the focus of this paper is the way in which their repercussions have been articulated in the artistic productions of 1990s and onwards. Positing that the national identity project and the language reforms are acts of linguistic and cultural violence, I examine the ways in which this violence has been represented on film and in contemporary visual art, as well as the narratives of censorship surrounding them, which embody the state violence criticized by these works of art in the first place. To that end, I will look at the representation of the intersection between language reform and state violence as embodied in the Blackboard Series (1992-3) by the Turkish artist Aydan Murtezao?lu, whose installations point at the violence inherent in a project that aims to repress and refashion the memory of the new republic; and Vahap Av?ar’s Atatürk and the Alphabet (1990), which gestures at the institutional silence around Kurdish and the unrepresentability of the ethnic other’s language within a nationalist framework. From there, I will move on to Handan Ipekçi’s feature film Büyük Adam Küçük A?k (2001), which deals with the friendship between a young Kurdish girl whose family has been murdered by the Turkish police, and her next door neighbor, an old Kemalist Turkish judge, who has no choice but to take her in. My main focus will be to analyze how the Kemalist ideology and the physical image of Atatürk himself feature in these works, and connect the present day discourses around the language reform to the initial years of the republic through evocations of images embedded in the Turkish collective memory.