There are four public spaces in Israel dedicated to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Turkey: the Atatürk Forest in Mount Carmel, planted by immigrants from Turkey in 1948; the Atatürk Memorial Park in Bat Yam, opened by the municipality of Bat Yam in 1998; the Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Plaza in the old city of Beersheba, constructed by the Turkish government and the municipality of Beersheba in 2002; and the Ataturk Garden in the Arkadaş Turkish Community Center in the city of Yehud, created by the same center’s administrators in 2003. Each public space plays a significant role within the identification practices of the Jews of Turkey in Israel, who also often identify as “Turkish-Jews,” as well as within the local, national, and transnational politics of heritage of Israeli and Turkish governments. Dedicating multiple public spaces to Atatürk in Israel strikes a parallel with the Turkish state’s nation-wide practice of naming various public spaces after the first president and adorning them with his statues. Each public space, with its contemporary usage or abandonment, tells the multifaceted story of Turkish-Jewish identification in Israel. This presentation investigates the production history and contemporary usage of these four public places in order to flesh out the ongoing shift in the identification of the Jews of Turkey in Israel. By combining archival research with ethnographic inquiry, I analyze the history of production and spatial semantics of these public spaces in order to understand and complicate the condition of “Turkish Jews” in Turkey and Israel. What does comparing similar public places in Turkey and Israel tell us about the identification practices of minorities in Turkey, and of the so-called Turkish diaspora abroad? Following the critiques of scholars such as Edward Said and Ella Shohat regarding the use of history, space, and memory in the Palestinian/Israeli context, how can we situate these spaces within national (Israeli) and transnational (Turkish) identifications? What advantages and disadvantages does the comparative method have in the questioning of the condition of “Turkish Jews,” especially given the current tense condition of Turkish-Israeli relations? With this presentation, I aim to contribute to discussions of comparative cultural studies in the Middle East, with a specific emphasis on Palestine/Israel and Turkey, as well as discussions of nationalism and transnational identification in the region.

Part of a larger project dealing with queer identity and aesthetics in Turkey, this paper focuses on the discourses around a number of films from Turkey that deal with gender – Zenne (2012), Conscience (2008) and Mustang (2015) – in order to interrogate the way in which representations of gender and sexual identity are interpreted and analyzed by various critics and scholars. As films with considerable international circulation, Zenne, Conscience and Mustang can serve as excellent case studies of how “minor” films from Turkey can complicate and problematize western European and north American notions of gender and sexuality, as well as demonstrate, through their reception by foreign critics particularly, the power dynamics and orientalist impulses inherent in the act of comparison between a perceived east and west. In this paper, I concentrate on the very language employed by critics and scholars who are dealing with these films in order to think more broadly about politics of comparison within a transnational context and argue that more often than not, the way in which we go about these comparisons determine the stakes and the crux of our analysis. Rather than single-directional comparisons, which inadvertently liken cultural productions of one context to another, I propose concurrent readings of cultural productions that strive to mutually illuminate one another.

In his introductory essay to an edited volume (2000) on questions of identity and multiculturalism in the context of Cypriot literature, Mehmet Yaşın coins the term ‘step-mothertongue’ to problematize the reifying processes of national literatures and canon formation. Namely, by questioning the monolingual, monolithic assumptions inherent in the concept of ‘mothertongue’, Yaşın seeks to overcome the restrictive borders of the national, and give legitimacy and intelligibility to a “multilingual and ‘uncanonized’ literature” found at the interstices of an “in-between literary region”—whether Turkish-Cypriot, Kurdish-Turkish, or otherwise. Using Yaşın’s formulation of ‘step-mothertongue’ as a point of departure, this paper constitutes a comparative study looking at key examples from the literary output of Mehmet Yaşın himself, alongside those of Kurdish-Turkish writer Yılmaz Odabaşı—each of them poets and novelists. By analyzing the linguistic (Turkish, Greek, Kurdish), generic (poetry, autobiography, fiction), and even textual (orthography, morphology) instability of their writings, I will explore how Yaşın and Odabaşı thematize the inarticulability of their work in locally specific ways (i.e. particular to Cyprus and Southeast Turkey/Diyarbakır, respectively) that undermine notions of a national Turkish literature narrowly defined. I will also consider the unique limitations of the transnational mode in the case of each writer, particularly in light of the shifting power dynamics that accompany literature written both within, and on the margins of, national literary corpuses, trends, and spaces.

In “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis” Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick and J.T. Way argue that transnationalism’s value as a concept lies in its ability to denaturalize the category of the nation. By focusing on the movements and exchanges between nationally delimited contexts, transnational approaches expose the constructedness of national boundaries and the miscegenation that is part and parcel of culture. And yet, as the term itself suggests, transnationalism cannot do away with the nation and must always work in relation to national categories. This paper discusses Murat Uyurkulak’s 2002 novel Tol: Bir Intikam Romani (Tol: A Revenge Novel) as a concurrently transnational and nationally specific work that actively undermines the national myths of homogeneity and consensus, while simultaneously (and inadvertently) demonstrating the dependence of transnationalism on nationally specific contexts. The novel tells the story of the (collapse of) the Turkish Left in the aftermath of military coups. Instead of adopting the socialist realism conventional in such narratives in Turkish literature, Uyurkulak uses a fragmented, experimental and highly colloquial language that is full of references to global pop culture, domesticated in a comically Turkish manner. As this panel contends, Turkish literature occupies a range of subject positions in transnational contexts. By analyzing this new language that Uyurkulak utilizes, this paper will show the transnational dialogues that occur within Turkish literature that make it impossible to see Turkish literature only as Turkish. What sets apart Uyurkulak’s novel from similarly transnational Turkish novels (the best known of which are Orhan Pamuk’s works) is its ability to create a cacophonous language that challenges homogenous national myths and gestures towards a need for transnationalism that is nevertheless extremely culturally specific. As a result, the novel resists transnational displacements even as it is informed by transnational dialogues. The paper will discuss this style through an analysis of the novel and by situating it in a larger discussion of a Turkish literary group named Afili Filintalar, which became famous in mid 2000s with a very popular literary and cultural blog and which Uyurkulak left in the aftermath of Gezi Protests in 2013.