Turkish Media and the Question of Identity
Panel 133, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 23 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
After Benedict Anderson’s historical thesis on the construction of nationalism, many scholars have related media to the processes of identity formation and transformation from the local to the national and transnational levels. This panel investigates how national, cultural, and ethnic identities are reconstructed and redefined in contemporary Turkish media. By focusing on the production, reception, and circulation of media products such as advertisements, television broadcasting, and newspaper, the presenters of this panel will examine the way in which commercial media define and promote national and ethnic identities in Turkey as well the tensions which sometimes arise through this process. The first paper of the panel, "Turkey in all its Colors? Representing Istanbul as the European Capital of Culture 2010," examines the advertising that capitalizes on Istanbul's 2010 role as European Capital of Culture, drawing attention to what is highlighted and obscured in the process of commodifying the modern metropolis of Istanbul for both domestic and international consumption. “Turkifies Even Americans: Nationalism in the Cola Turka Advertisements,” focuses on the cultural politics of the Cola Turka advertising campaign to identify how it articulates both global resistance and Turkish identity. “National Characteristics of Turkish Television: Homogeneity v.s. Hybridity,” questions whether television contributes to the construction of a homogenized national community, and argues that the key to understanding “Turkishness” on TV lies in the ways television is immersed in re-imagined and hybrid possibilities of national and gender identities. "Turkey in all its colors: Renegotiating Identity through Film," examines how the tropes of memory, identity, and home are presented and renegotiated in filmic portrayals of Istanbul since the 1990s. Shifting to the print medium, “Martyrs and Traitors: A Study of the Narrative Web Spun for Operation Sun (Güne? Harekat?) in Hürriyet,” examines rhetoric in news stories in the lead-up to and execution of Operation Sun (Gunes Harekati) in the Turkish mainstream daily paper Hurriyet. The last paper of the panel, "Topography of Nationalism in Turkey: actors, discourses, and the struggle for hegemony," deconstructs the myth of the ‘homogeneous nation’ by drawing together a Gramscian reading on nationalism with Jean Pierre Faye's notion of topography to highlight the heterogeneous nature of Turkey's nationalist discourses.
In the late twentieth century, Turkey experienced an extreme rise in nationalism. During that time, the Turkish media began to take advantage of this rising nationalistic sentiment to construct new forms of identity. The impetus for this shift was sometimes related to issues of assumed national security, sometimes ideological and, more often than not, commercial as well. Whatever the rationale, today we find Turkish national identity and the various ethnic identities of Turkey polarized and transformed by the national media. Presenters of the panel lead us into a productive discussion about the inherent or constructed tensions and the relationships between nationalism, ethnicity and the global and domestic media by going beyond the inadequate binaries that often arise from such discussions. The insights from this panel help us understand the contribution of media to nation making and the role of Turkish media in the construction of national and ethnic identities.
Disciplines
Participants
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Mrs. Yesim Kaptan
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Mr. Hikmet Kocamaner
-- Presenter
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Dr. Josh Carney
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Capri Karaca
-- Presenter
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Umut Ozkirimli
-- Discussant, Chair
Presentations
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Mrs. Yesim Kaptan
Since the late 1990s, Turkish television has been inundated with the sensational advertisements of national brands that gesture towards the contextualization of the global economic environment. During the 1990s and 2000s, “Turkishness” became, for the first time, a significant theme in the advertising industry. In advertisements for the soft drink Cola Turka, U.S. comedian Chevy Chase “becomes Turkish,” while an “American” soldier quits fighting in Iraq as a result of drinking the “Cola of Turkey.”
In this paper, I explore how the Turkish advertising industry shapes and represents national identity, global culture, and local values, during the rapid globalization process in Turkey. I analyze the rise of Turkish nationalism and the reaction to globalizing consumerism, through advertisements broadcast on Turkish television stations between 1990 and 2007. I argue that the advertising industry promotes a national culture that is embedded in neoliberal capitalist marketing and mass commodity consumption. In this manner, the Turkish advertising industry constructs a Turkish national identity with consumer values at its core. I analyze the advertisements of Cola Turka, that emphasize Turkish national identity and argue that these ads attempt to articulate national brand identity, in order to find a market strategy that differentiates these agencies from their multinational counterparts. I explain how the advertising campaigns of Cola Turka positioned this brand between globalization and anti-Western nationalism. After a close examination of media texts (advertisements), and based on my ethnographic data, I argue that the Cola Turka advertising campaigns not only represent these brands as Turkey’s “high-quality” products, but also promote them as cultural commodities, through which consumers can express their national identity. In other words, these commercials deliberately offer the Turkish audience the opportunity to re-claim their national identity through their consumer choice. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to explain how the Turkish nation was constructed in these commercials, and how Turks are being constituted as consumer citizens by advertising during the production of national identity. In addition to the instrumental role of commodity consumption in nation making, I am concerned with how the marketing practices and campaigns of contemporary advertisers in Turkey construct the nation in an atmosphere of competing nationalizing and globalizing forces.
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Mr. Hikmet Kocamaner
The phenomenon of Islamic television broadcasting in Turkey complicates and problematizes the conventional narrative of secularism, which assumes a clear-cut distinction between secular and religious, public and private, and traditional and modern. These broadcasters challenge the logic of secularism by presenting Islam (often implicitly) as a set of discourses and practices that regulate all aspects of an individual's comportments as well as the norms of a collective living rather than as merely a transcendental spirituality experienced in the private sphere. They also illustrate the possibility of the co-existence of the secular and the religious by fostering new habits of media production and consumption tied to a new Islamic bourgeois ethics. The development of television broadcasting in Turkey - from the past monopoly of the state to the multi-channel liberal media environment of today - exemplifies the problems with the exclusive nature of the secular, public sphere, and the necessity for the reconfiguration of this sphere and the idea of secularism germinated in it, to make them more inclusive and pluralistic. Islamic TV channels illustrate the necessity of secularism to acknowledge the unavoidable yet denied plurality and heterogeneity of the liberal public.
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Capri Karaca
The city of Istanbul is in the throes of making itself up as a European Capital of Culture (ECC) for 2010. This transformation includes numerous facelift projects and cultural events being utilized to craft an image befitting the city's new appellation. Looking back at the plans to physically transform Istanbul over the last century, from Bouvard to Dalan, we discover that image making is not a new phenomenon to this city. However, a more aggressive, unified and capital-driven brand of transformation has evolved and is the genesis of the seemingly unrelenting construction boom including urban renewal/regeneration projects, high-end retail, residential and entertainment spaces and state-of-the-art transportation networks.&nbs p; This development trend is part of the larger attempt on the part of politicians and businessmen to makeover Istanbul into what Saskia Sassen has called a "global city". Istanbul will take center stage in this transnational phenomenon in 2010.
What is revealing is how is this "global city" is being packaged to prospective consumers. As Ay?e Öncü has noted, "In the world of late capitalism that we experience today large metropolises figure prominently as core settings for the display and promotion of 'cultural heritage' as a marketable commodity. " I argue that in the Turkish context, Istanbul's imperial past and its resultant multi-cultural present are being used as "cultural currency" to attract foreign investment, trade and tourism at an unprecedented scale, of which the Istanbul ECC project is an integral part. In order to produce an understanding about this recent branding of Istanbul as the Cultural Capital of Europe, I will analyze visual media used in promoting Istanbul in the lead up to the 2010 festivities. In particular, I will focus on the videos produced by the Istanbul ECC agency to determine which parts of Turkish history and culture are excluded, which are included, how they are being represented and for which audiences. I will also consider the implications of distilling Turkish culture into select representations and symbols amid the backdrop of Turkey's accession bid to the European Union.
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Dr. Josh Carney
This paper examines rhetoric in news stories in the lead-up to and execution of Operation Sun (Gunes Harekati) in the Turkish mainstream daily paper Hurriyet between October 2007 and February of 2008. The choices to study press, news stories, and Hurriyet in particular are discussed and a contextualization of four key dynamics in Turkish society is provided: the relationship between the Turkish republic and the military, the history of Kurds in Turkey, the relationship between the US and Turkey, and the rise of Islam in contemporary Turkey. Moving to the press coverage, key narrative themes arising from the operation are identified and located in terms of subject position along a proposed spectrum of identification/othering. Such themes include the extremely distinct positions of martyrs (soldiers who died for Turkey) and traitors (PKK members who should be killed), which represent profound othering and offer little opportunity for identification with one another. Internally intermediate positions represented by narratives of the homeland, eight captured Turkish soldiers, a Kurdish political party (the DTP), and a Turkish pop star who spoke out on the war (Bulent Ersoy) all offer some possibility of narrative stepping stones for identification between the two extremes. Narratives regarding the US and the Iraqi Kurds suggest that yet a third category, the extra-societal other, has a large role in the dynamic of identification/othering: this is the unpredictable, unknowable other, a position which, viewed retrospectively, suggests that the distance between martyr and traitor would not be as great as it initially appears. The discussion is informed by the literature of propaganda studies and by psychological and sociological approaches to othering. Noting a general trend in propaganda studies to find that which is searched for, namely propaganda, this paper attempts to move beyond such an outlook and identify possible sites for identification within what could certainly be called a propagandistic, nationalistic set of texts. With this end in mind, the paper concludes with a discussion about the implications of such an approach for propaganda studies in general.
