Occidentalism in Turkey: Questions of Modernity and National Identity in Turkish Radio Broadcasting 9780755610174, 9781845116538

Citation preview

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. p.64. Back cover. Radyo, vol.1, no.3, 15 February 1942. 2. p.92. Sound engineers Muzaffer Haruno¤lu and Suat Osmano¤lu at work in the studio. Radyo, vol.3, no.31, 15 June 1944. 3. p.128. Comic strip by Ramiz. Radyo, vol.2, no.14, 15 January 1943, p.23. 4. p.157. Comic strip by Ramiz. Radyo, vol.2, no.16, 15 March 1943, p.21. 5. p.158. The ‘magical door’ of radio drama: Two actors, Vahyi Öz and Reflat Altay are seen using the ‘magical door’ in the radio studio during the production of a radio drama. The door was regarded as ‘magical’ by radio producers since it could be utilised for performing a variety of acts. Radyo, vol.1, no.8, 15 June 1942, p.14. 6. p.182. Cover page. Radyo, vol.1, no 4, 15 March 1942.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘One who goes too far East, because of geography, arrives in the West. The reverse is also true,’ says the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan. I made a detour of a similar kind. This book on Occidentalism in Turkey is primarily based on a PhD thesis that was submitted to the Sociology Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2000. In order to write this thesis, I had to pass through various orientalisms and occidentalisms, both in Turkey and Britain, discovering the many and fragmented selves within my ‘Turkish’ present. However, the journey did not end there. I re-wrote my thesis to be published as a book in Turkish in 2005. Informed by many insightful and positive critiques that the book had generated in Turkey, I revisited the manuscript yet again to re-write it as a book in English. The re-thinking and re-formulations in each phase meant travelling in between languages and different intellectual and academic contexts, which introduced me to the realities of both physical and mental borders. However, it also gave me the best of gifts: the possibility of sharing the concerns of critical thinking across contexts that seek a future life beyond existing borders. I would like to thank a great many people who have helped in this long process, although it is not technically possible to cite all their names here. I feel a deep gratitude to my former supervisor, now colleague and friend Andrew Barry, who has always provided support as well as new and challenging ideas. I would like to thank Ali Rattansi, Celia Lury, Deniz Kandiyoti, Les Back and Vikki Bell for their valuable comments that helped me in re-shaping my thesis. I also thank John Keane, Nicholas Garnham and Paddy Scannell for giving me the first inspiration to conduct this research. I owe a debt of gratitude to Ayfle Öncü for her encouraging support, and Zafer Yenal for being there for illuminating conversations. I am greatly thankful to Alisa Lebow, Asena Günal, Elif Kale, Nadir Özbek and Orhan Koçak for reading parts of the manuscript(s) and providing the most insightful comments. Yet, I know that I could not do justice to most of them.

x

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

I would like to thank Ayfle Ça¤lar and Susan Zimmerman from Central European University and Yael Navaro-Yashin from Cambridge University, who have made it possible for me to spend time in the most stimulating environments of these universities where parts of this book have been written. I also owe many thanks to my Turkish publishers, Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Semih Sökmen, for their longstanding solidarity and invaluable contributions to the realisation of the book both in Turkish and English. Of course, my thanks also go to Jenna Steventon as my editor at I.B.Tauris, to Nina Ergin as the meticulous copy-editor of this book and to Mehmet Ekinci, Nilay Erten and Sedat Atefl for their generous help in the preparation of the book. I also appreciate the vital contributions of the Overseas Research Students Award Scheme, the British Council, the British Federation of Women Graduates Charitable Foundation, the MERC Award, the Peter Wall Institute of the University of British Columbia, and the Bo¤aziçi University Research Fund for supporting the various stages of my research and writing. All in all, I would like to thank my many colleagues, students, and friends here and there for the most precious encounters. I am grateful to my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, Ufuk, Gülkan and Ya¤mur, who were with me in Büyükada while I was trying to write despite all the temptations of the beautiful environment. My mother and father always worried that I was working too much while writing this book. I am deeply grateful for their care; how I wish my father were alive to see that the long work has finally come to a brief pause. Finally, I owe my greatest thanks to Timuçin Gürer, simply for everything.

1 INTRODUCTION: RADIO TECHNOLOGY AND THE IMAGINARIES OF MODERNITY AND NATION Just as there are heroin junkies, cocaine junkies, power junkies, and so on, I’m a fifty-five-year-old radio junkie. I mean, I suffer from radiomania. I listen to the voices of people Calling me from the four corners of the world. We have a distant relationship: I could care less what they do, I’m just curious how they talk about it. And I must admit I like their songs, too, all the world’s songs, in any language or style. But have you noticed? These days they sing even as they’re at one another’s throat again. And when they tell how they fight, You’d think they were singing love songs. Naz›m Hikmet, Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse1

‘Listening to the world’ was a catchword in the first half of the twentieth century in Turkey, as it was in many other countries. Radio, or ‘wireless telephone,’ as it was called in those days, enabled people to relate to distant sounds — disembodied and objectified, yet subjectively and affectively re-

2

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

appropriated. Dreams, desires and fears hatched elsewhere entered the lives of the listeners, altering their sense perceptions and longings, and triggering new imaginaries. Radio communicates through distance, but also produces intimacy. It contributes to the disenchantment of the world through the isolation and abstraction of sounds, yet re-enchants the world through its technological condensing of everything there is to hear in the world. Today, there is a nostalgic yearning for the ‘radio days,’ accompanied, perhaps, by images of family gatherings around big radio sets tuned into magical sounds — romantic songs, sad dramas, and reports of exciting world events, including war news. Radio has been naturalised in the history of the modern family and the nation. However, radio broadcasting was also deliberately utilised to build nations, for political propaganda and for spreading cultures of consumption, by states and ruling classes. In this respect, radio is not a naive and nostalgic figure, but a public political instrument. Radio figures in the ‘audible past’ of the nation as a medium of both amusement and aggressive politics.2 Radio is not only a technology of modernity, but also reveals the maelstrom of modernity, to use Marshall Berman’s phrase, which has ‘affected constructs and practices of sound, hearing and listening’ (Sterne 2003: 2). Yet, there is little research on this aspect of radio broadcasting. In an age of increasingly sophisticated communication technologies and interactive radio channels, the naive image of the ‘radio days’ persists. I have several aims in making the early days of radio broadcasting in Turkey the object of analysis in this book. My first aim and initial intention was to re-think the question of nation-building in Turkey in connection to the use of modern technologies, such as radio broadcasting. Many existing studies, including Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff’s notable research on the role of the BBC in crafting a national culture in Britain (1991), have focused on a similar question. The question of how national identity has been constructed through radio broadcasting leads to an interest in both radio production (that is, the institutional and legal framework of radio companies, broadcasters, and the genres, style and scheduling of radio programmes) and the audience’s reception of programmes. I have chosen to leave aside questions of reception in this study, due to reasons which I will elaborate later, but I will dwell on issues pertaining to the production of radio programmes throughout the following chapters. However, neither nation-building, nor the history of radio broadcasting in Turkey is the central focus of this book. Instead of confining my research questions to a case-study that neatly delineates the inside and outside of a bounded case, I have chosen to dwell

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

3

on the constitutive boundaries that figure in the conceptions of modernity and nation, as well as of East and West in Turkish Radio, and to conceptualise their significance in broader terms. This new direction has been informed not only by theoretical orientations, but also by the intricacies of the data itself. My research on Turkish Radio raises several crucial questions that challenge existing theories, such as theories on national identity and modernisation, and demand new theorising. Hence, a theoretical response to these challenges has given the book a different twist and a dimension that goes beyond a case-study of radio or nation-building. In fact, new theorising that engages with the empirical gaps and impurities within the research (namely, missing data, as in the case of destroyed archives, or data that does not fit into existing frames of analysis) constitutes the backbone of this study. Indeed, the book argues for the need for a new way of theorising modern Turkish history in relation to the Western constructions of modernity. Occidentalism and Occidentalist fantasy stand out as key conceptual tools in this endeavour. These concepts will be employed to analyse the dialogical making of modernity in a non-Western context. My claim is that the political subjectivity of the Turkish elite who designed, controlled and problematised the use of radio broadcasting in Turkey — a society usually associated with the so-called East in its relations with the West, all the while desiring to be Western and modern — sheds light on the dynamics of Occidentalism, while it is also made intelligible within them. These arguments are based on my research on radio broadcasting, particularly of the period between 1927, when the first radio station was built in Istanbul, to the end of the 1940s, during which radio became nationalised and shifted its focus to Ankara. I have chosen to study this particular period first, because radio was significantly perceived at that time as the ‘voice of the nation.’ After the 1950s, radio broadcasting lost its general national significance and gained a more restricted meaning as an instrument of the ruling party (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980). The decade of the Democratic Party rule during the 1950s was highly chaotic, with intense and wide-ranging struggles over the meaning of the national, as well as a proliferation of the loci of economic and social power. Thus, the period on which I focus was more authoritarian with its one-party-rule; during this period the national attempt to re-build a new cultural and social life was at its peak. Radio broadcasting was enthusiastically used towards this end. Another reason why I chose to focus on this period has to do with World War II. Not only were these years important for defining Turkish national identity, but it is also well known that radio broadcasting was employed by many countries for purposes of propaganda and in order to recruit support for political caus-

4

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

es during the war. For example, the BBC Turkish Section as part of the World Service was established during this period, in close connection with the new strategies adopted in British foreign politics. These were the years when the contested realm of strategies and efforts in enlisting culture for political ends by the means of communications were more overt. Therefore, my claim is that this somewhat extraordinary war period also demonstrates the key dialogical concerns in the representation and negotiation of the Western model, which in the following years was largely normalised. The history of communications, let alone radio broadcasting, is an understudied subject in Turkey. Most of the works on nationalism dwell on political history, a concept which excludes the study of more everyday and mundane issues. This may be due to taking ‘the claims of nationalism to be a political movement much too literally and much too seriously’ (Chatterjee 1993b: 5). This research takes the challenge to expand the limits of the political, connecting radio broadcasting to the Occidentalist national imagination in Turkey. Another challenge comes from a valuable study on the history of Turkish Radio broadcasting (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980), which has advanced the argument that Turkish Radio failed to achieve its aims. According to the author, radio was not able to disseminate national culture and has not been used efficiently as an instrument to discipline and educate the people. Kocabaflo¤lu, too, posits a gap between the situation in Turkey and an ideal model of efficient broadcasting serving the nation. He imagines the BBC, for example, to be such an ideal model. This book is critical of such a framework and aims to illustrate that radio broadcasting in Turkey was not a failure, but that it has been an efficient medium for experimenting with aural representations and producing the Occidentalist fantasy while shaping the subjectivity of its performers. But Occidentalism is a highly contested term; let me first clarify how I employ this concept, not only for purposes of delineating my position, but also in order to refine and make the conceptual tool more appropriate to convey my arguments that seek to go beyond the East/West dichotomy. The most apparent connotation of Occidentalism today is anti-Westernism. Yet, beyond this popular understanding, the concept has also been employed in different academic contexts with divergent meanings; thus, it is rather ambivalent. The term has been popularised recently by Buruma and Margalit’s book entitled Occidentalism (2004). Since then, Occidentalism has been usually associated with dangerous anti-Westernisms, and after 9/11 specifically with Islamic movements, in the Western media. But if Westerners regard Occidentalism as a threat to the core values of modernity, non-Westerners, on the other hand, have embraced Occidentalism as a

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

5

response against the colonising West. For example, the Egyptian philosopher and Muslim reformer Hassan Hanafi has explained Occidentalism as a ‘science’ and a necessary counter-discourse against the aggressive and declining West. Hanafi’s project is to transform the Occident into an object, as Westerners have done with the Orient, ‘with the purpose of recreating an independent Arabic intellectual tradition ... Arabs must learn to desiccate the West in the same way one does it with mice in the laboratory’ (cited in Tonnesson 1994). According to Hanafi, Occidentalism involves a reversing of the roles: ‘The West becomes the Other, the Orient is restored to the Self.’3 While not simply pursuing a political anti-Western stance, Hanafi nevertheless defines the East/South as a distinct entity to be studied from a non-Western perspective, an entity which can be defined in national terms4 — a critical vantage point that I shall problematise in this book. The popular accent on Occidentalism as anti-Westernism, most probably due to the present international political context, overshadows its previous usages, which imply the very opposite. Long before Buruma and Margalit’s book appeared, Occidentalism had been employed to denote Westernism. For example, Xiaomei Chen discussed Occidentalism in China (1995), ascribing a positive meaning to it as Westernism, which, in the author’s view, provided a counter-discourse against the established regime. In yet another theoretical vein, the historical process of making and signifying the West was also labelled Occidentalism, for example, in the work of scholars such as Couze Venn (2000), Walter Mignolo (2000) and Fernando Coronil (1996). I contend that the differing meanings of Occidentalism in different theoretical and political perspectives can be interpreted as a sign that testifies to the power of the concept rather than its inadequacy. Occidentalism is useful as a concept precisely because of the ambivalence of its meaning. Although Occidentalism is taken to mean both Westernism and anti-Westernism in the existing literature, this does not merely point to the existence of theoretical controversy or confusion in my view, but reveals something very important: the historical doubling of Orientalism and Occidentalism both in the West and the non-West. It changes, depending on your vantage point; however, if we go beyond relativism, we may see that the discourse on modernity inevitably includes the entangled representations of Western definitions of the East, or the East reacting to the Western gaze (in which the East and West have changing contents and locations, of course). I would say that Westernism and anti-Westernism are distorted mirror images of each other, despite the historically over-determined hierarchy between what is designated as East and West.

6

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

But the reciprocity of the constructions of East and West should not mislead us regarding the asymmetry of power relations. The half-acknowledged but still half-denied background condition of modernity is European colonialism. As Françoise Vergès has argued, ‘Europe’s colonial domination has been the subject of a profound forgetting. This forgetting should be seen as a system: it is vital, for instance, to place the history of slavery outside of the official story of modernity’ (2004: 187). The Occidentalism of the West embedded in the historical context of colonialism and modernity generates the various orientalisms and occidentalisms as we know them today. Mignolo suggests in his Local Histories/Global Designs that ‘“Occidentalism” was a notion that contributed to the self-definition of post-Renaissance Europe,’ and functions as ‘as an overarching metaphor of the modern/colonial world’ to define the limits of the modern/colonial knowledge and imaginary (2000: 29). Drawing on the historical account of modernity/coloniality analysed by Mignolo, it becomes clear that a certain representation of the West (Occidentalism) was first fashioned by Western narratives and sciences in complicity with colonialism. In other words, the geo-political entity called the West was constructed in its consciously crafted representations, which mirrored it in the rest of the world. Orientalism, then, is produced within the Occidentalism of the West, enacting the categorical space of the Other located somewhere outside of the present history of modernity, but as a necessary constitutive outside to define the Western self.5 In Mignolo’s words, ‘without Occidentalism there is no Orientalism’ (2000: 28). In a similar vein, Fernando Coronil has suggested a move ‘reorienting our attention from the problematic of “Orientalism,” which focuses on the deficiencies of the West’s representations of the Orient, to that of “Occidentalism,” which refers to the conceptions of the West animating these representations. It entails relating the observed to the observers, products to production, knowledge to its sites of formation’ (1996: 56). If the Occidentalism of the West means the making and representing of the West, then the constitutive alterity to this definition would be the East as the Other. Yet, despite the clarity of the projection at the level of representations, the category of the East is problematic in terms of its historical substance. Is the East a mere fantasy of the West, enacted by the construction of Western modernity/colonialism? Is it just a passive object that endorses Western hegemony? I would argue that we cannot and should not avoid the question of agency of the non-West and the subject constitution at a more analytical level. We cannot but ask the question of what happens when that externalised and supposedly silent Other, placed outside of history and forever doomed to chase Western values and targets without success,

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

7

speaks and answers back; for example, by using the means of Western technology in the context that I study here. The Other is not only represented by the Western subject within a discursive trope which Edward Said brilliantly analysed in his study of Orientalism (1995). A historically coeval representation of the Other has also been produced by the Other itself, aspiring to fill in the subject position. The Other’s inhabiting the space of the Other and speaking for itself produces an Occidentalism of the non-West, in which the locus of the enunciation of modernity shifts from West to non-West, with dramatic differences in its content and performance. Hence, I argue that Occidentalism (and from now on I use the term to mean Occidentalism of the non-West) is a means of performing Western modernity, while at times resisting its colonising move. It is Westernism and anti-Westernism at the same time. A second clarification concerns the subject status of the non-West. Different from accounts of Occidentalism which re-construct the Other as the victim and wage a war against the West in that respect, I argue that Occidentalism is not only a victim’s discourse. Occidentalism may seek its legitimacy by mobilising the resentment of the people against colonisation and, hence, refer to the non-West as the victim of Western modernity. But, as I argue, this is not the whole story, since Occidentalism utilises the status of the victim to build a certain regime of power and to constitute itself as a hegemonic discourse. The category of the Other is interpellated within Occidentalism to produce a nativism by which other Others are produced, judged and marginalised. Therefore, the concept of Occidentalism in its very dialogism opens up a very important space in which it is possible to reflect critically on the power relations under the disguise of Eastern and Western cultures. It is also helpful for re-thinking the historical conditions and limits of Western modernity, which has established itself as a model for many non-Western cultures. In that respect, the ‘new Turkey’ at the beginning of the twentieth century, which opted for Western modernity through a sudden and major rupture with its Oriental past — the Ottoman Empire, historically symbolising the Orient for Europe and a favourite object for Orientalism6 — provides a rich and complex case, not only for seeing the Western and non-Western dimensions of Occidentalism, but also for tracking the ‘intertwined histories,’ in Said’s terms, of East and West, of Orientalism and Occidentalism.

8

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

National Identity, Western Technology and Turkey as an Exception The study of Occidentalism may also provide a way of de-mythologising Turkish national identity. Turkey’s self-conscious deliberations on the delicate balancing of modernity with nationalism deserve attention in this respect. A Turkish scholar put it this way in the 1960s: Of all the nations in the world, Turkey is unique in having failed to forge a consistent image of herself. Is she of Europe or the East? Is she a modern nation-state or a feudalist association wallowing in the Middle Ages? Is she a popular democracy or a camouflaged group dictatorship? Aware of their lack of articulateness in international discourse, the Turks blame themselves for this confusion (Eren 1963: 249). Although I do not at all agree that Turkey is unique in its undetermined position between East and West, and that ‘confusion’ is an appropriate term, I would still argue that Turkey has indeed unique aspects for many reasons, owing to its past, particularly due to the complicated history of the Ottoman Empire in its relations with Europe, within which the binary of the self and the Other is not easily contained. Leaving the historical elaboration of this complexity to the following pages, I believe that the above-cited paragraph needs further interpretation here, in order to point to the significance of Occidentalism for analysing national identity. In depicting the ‘confusion’ of Turkey to which Eren (1963) refers, but at the same time reproduces, the trope of the exception — a common defensive reflex not only in Turkish politics, but also in academia — positions Turkey as a unique case and thereby isolates it from the lens of critical and comparative analysis. Exceptionalism and the attendant resistance to comparison can be read as a displaced reaction against the colonisation of the West. Mustafa Kemal, who declared himself the father of Turks, said in a public speech in 1921: ‘We should be proud that we do not resemble and do not compare. Because we look like ourselves!’ The defensive exceptionalism here could only be justified in reference to the need of an authentic national identity, hence the fear of resembling anyone else. The fear is not independent of Occidentalism because national identity as a category not only signifies authenticity, but is also determined by a Western ontology of the modern community, embodied more specifically in the order of international politics. Crafting a national identity has been paradoxically integral to becoming modern (and Westernised) for non-Westerners. Exceptionalism goes hand-in-hand with

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

9

induced inferiority and the fear that ‘our’ modern national identity is in fact a mere imitation. Therefore, in order to open a new theoretical path that goes beyond exceptionalism, I suggest discussing the concept of national identity in Turkey, with reference to a broader and textured historical universe that comprises both East and West. The question of technology, and particularly communication technologies, has been of central importance in both demarcating and bridging the boundaries between Eastern and Western nations. Benedict Anderson’s path-breaking argument consists of the claim that nations were fashioned according to a model. The idea that nations are imagined and not expressions of a natural heritage — such as language, race or religion — gained significance with his book Imagined Communities (1991).7 Anderson’s contribution was furthermore to contextualise the imagination by emphasising the role of communications, in particular the printing press, in the making of a national community. He dwelled on the interaction between the capitalist system of production, technology of communication,8 and the demise of human linguistic diversity (Anderson 1991: 43). Yet, the scope of his historical analysis was limited by a functionalist interpretation when he took the nation to be necessarily bound up with a certain function, that of giving meaning to life.9 In this framework, all communities had to assume the form of a nation once their ‘sacred genealogies’ were annihilated by European imperialism (Anderson 1991: 70). Late nationalist imaginings outside of Europe had no choice but to adopt ‘the model.’10 A ‘new consciousness’ — a product of ‘homogeneous empty time,’ which Anderson uses in reference to Walter Benjamin — facilitated this. Homogeneous empty time ‘creates amnesias and estrangements exactly parallel to the forgetting of childhood brought on by puberty’ (Anderson 1998: 57). However, despite the use of a psychological language, Anderson in his work on nationalism does not take up the question of subjectivity in national imaginings, especially of those who had to follow, rather than create, the model. For example, Anderson — for whose argument the institutional bases of nationalist ideas are very important — points to the ‘young officers (‘Turks’) produced by new military academies’ who ‘played significant roles in the development of nationalism’ in Ottoman society (Anderson 1991: 120); however, why these young officers accepted the name ‘Young Turks’ (Jön Türk) given to them by Europeans remains unexamined. In a similar vein, Anderson finds ‘the seeds of Turkish nationalism’ in ‘the appearance of a lively vernacular press in Istanbul in the 1870s’ (1991: 75), but does not inquire about the particular setting within which an imported technology and medium may have triggered the formation of a national imagination.11

10

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

One is reminded of Partha Chatterjee’s critical question (1993b: 5): ‘If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?’ Post-colonial criticism offers a critique of Anderson’s work by recasting the question of the nation within the terms of subjectivity/intersubjectivity shaped by colonial and post-colonial dynamics.12 As Chatterjee puts it, ‘the theoretical tendency represented by Anderson attempts to treat the phenomenon as part of the universal history of the modern world’ (1993b: 5). Instead, Chatterjee has focused on the anti-colonial difference in the definitive frame of the division made between the two domains of anti-colonial nationalism, namely the spiritual and the material, or the inside and the outside (to which consecutively the national imagination and Western science and technology belong). However, he focuses more on the former, the unique features of anti-colonial orientations towards modern culture in the community, while bracketing out questions of technology as insignificant within a problematic of imitation, particularly in his work on post-colonial nationalism (1993a, 1993b).13 While exploring the question of anti-colonial nationalism as a ‘derivative discourse,’ he has opposed anti-colonial difference to imitation. Therefore, in this frame of analysis, the post-colonial nation would have its organic spontaneity stem from the community (despite its universalised thematic of Western modernity), but statecraft, economy, and science and technology would remain strictly technical and artificial as components of Western modernity (or capitalism). The dichotomy between culture and technology, and consequently that of East and West, is once more inherently maintained and reproduced in this way.14 Is it possible, then, to repose the question of national identity and technology, without either treating technology as a universal and structural determinant of the national project, or rendering it alien, or at best insignificant, in order to emphasise an anti-colonial subjectivity (or post-imperial subjectivity, as would be the case with Turkey)? In other words, is the Turkish nation constructed according to a Western model using Western technological tools, such as print or radio,15 or is it a creative project in which the intentions and willpower of the national elite are more influential than the material impact of penetrating Western technologies? Is it to civilisation/technology or culture that one should give priority in analysis? This question has been of utmost importance for my study. I argue that the question is especially significant for understanding Turkish nationalism, which in almost all of its variants was imagined as an essential national culture, harmonised with Western civilisation as a source of modern technologies and

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

11

techniques.16 However, Turkey’s status as a modern nation was never unambiguous and usually associated with the idea that it constitutes an exception, as we have seen. Yet, the supposedly unique combination of culture and civilisation in Turkey always produced failures with regard to an imagined Western model; hence, the ongoing Occidentalist-nationalist fervor to instrumentalise ‘civilisation’ for shaping culture, mostly in authoritarian and undemocratic ways. The dichotomies of East/West, culture/civilisation, spiritual/material, and organic/artificial have been functional for reproducing and legitimising national identity and power in Turkey. If this is the case, how is it possible to go beyond the limiting dichotomies for a critical historical assessment of Turkish history and the role of radio in the making of the Turkish nation? Model/Copy: The Power of the ‘Real Thing’ Over the last few decades, many studies on Turkey have shared a common perspective in criticising the frameworks of modernisation and Westernisation, and at the same time focusing on different aspects of the life of the nation, such as gender relations, ethnicity, religion, and architecture,17 hitherto mostly unexamined in scholarly works. These dwell on the construction of the nation, and/or the conception of modernity in Turkey. Despite the use of contemporary theories to analyse the Turkish context, one can still see that the effects of exceptionalism persist in some examples, albeit in a rather more complex way than we saw with Eren (1963). For example, there is a tendency to label Turkish nationalism as a ‘project,’ a fabrication conducted by the Turkish elite.18 Here we witness a couple of reversals that produce the exception: first of all, the Kemalists’ claim that the Turkish nation as a whole became aware of the national potential under the guidance of a father Turk, Atatürk, is reversed. Instead of the positive values attached to Kemalism, as in the dominant nationalist ideology, the recent emphasis on the national project portrays these values as negative, by arguing that in fact the national project was alien to the people. Nevertheless, the same power is ascribed to the intentions of the leader and consequently his followers. According to recent critical views, the Turkish modernising elite voluntarily, yet selectively adopted Western civilisation and imposed it on the masses.19 However, this reversal does not restore the missing historicity.20 Understanding nationalism as a project renders Turkish nationalism a non-historical and non-sociological phenomenon. The second reversal occurs in the critique of modernisation theories. As Bozdo¤an and Kasaba argue, ‘in Turkey and around the world today, we are witnessing the eclipse of the progressive and emancipatory discourse of

12

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

modernity’ (1997: 3). Where classical modernisation theories have celebrated the adaptation of Western modernity and technology in Turkey,21 more specifically of communication technology,22 as essential for the so-called Turkish development, critiques of modernisation mostly dwell on narratives and culture and ignore questions of technology, which in their view do not deserve special attention for making sense of the Turkish experience of modernity. They ‘publicly debate and criticize the Kemalist doctrine as a patriarchal and antidemocratic imposition from above that has negated the historical and cultural experience of the people in Turkey’ (Bozdo¤an and Kasaba 1997: 4). Where the former saw a promising example of universal modernity, the latter treats the Turkish case as a failure to achieve a democratic modern society. Whether the history of Westernisation is designated as a success or failure, both versions imply that Turkey, which imitated the West, is an exceptional case: an inept vehicle for Western modernisation. It is bound to be a copy. As long as Turkish national identity is treated within a problematic of imitation, the West continues to be the stage for ‘real’ modernity to play its techniques and institutions; the implicit Western model remains intact and the copy is inevitably deficient. I would argue that the framework of model and copy is embedded in paradigmatic assumptions deriving from a certain conception of modernity as authentically Western. For example, even the modernisation theories that have celebrated the Turkish development nevertheless imply an inevitable failure in the long run. The process of Westernisation in Turkey, as a belated transferral of Western values and techniques, is bound to be distorted in the end because of the essential particulars of the specific space (‘essentially stagnant Orient’). It is not surprising, then, that Bernard Lewis, who once praised ‘the emergence of modern Turkey’ (1968), describes contemporary Turkey after thirty years as still facing ‘important choices’ between the Middle East and the West (B. Lewis 1997: 48).23 Turkey is not there yet because ‘catching up with the modern world means more than borrowing or buying modern technology’ (46). Lewis clearly marks the dichotomy between authenticity and imitation, and the opposition of culture and technology significantly figures in it. Western technology, whatever its direct references are — be they the technologies of capitalist production, or the technologies of democratic government — seems to embody the ‘real thing’ of modernity. The ‘real thing,’24 which metaphysically invokes the West as authentically superior, despite the historical hybridity in its process of construction, continues to haunt nonWesterners. In that respect, Kevin Robins’s words, which are indeed critical of modernisation approaches, but charged with meanings of

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

13

Orientalism/Occidentalism are telling: according to him, Turkish culture ‘has been imitative and derivative in its emulation of the European model’ (Robins 1996: 67). He has argued that Kemalists sought a simulation of the original paradigm, ‘but, of course, however good the simulation, it does not amount to the real thing’ (Robins 1996: 67, emphasis added). Thus, one is confronted with several questions deriving from the above statements concerning the so-called Westernisation in Turkey: the problem of how one might conceive of ‘impact’ and ‘influences’; the problem of what ‘imitation’ may mean; and, last but not least, the problem of what ‘the real thing’ is. These questions are not only peculiar to the Turkish context, as exceptionalism would imply, but bear utmost significance for understanding the historical context of the relations between the West and its Others. The question of Turkish Westernisation is inevitably bound with the question of how the West is historically constructed, or, in other words, how it became the West as an imposed model. Post-colonial critics have written extensively on the construction of Western modernity through colonial practices and discourses. Modernity is a Western concept, ‘inextricably linked to the history of European colonialism’ (Osborne 1995: 13). Mignolo has suggested to go back even further ‘to rethink the historical articulation of Christianity (that generated the enlightenment, that generated Liberalism and Marxism) in Europe with the invention of the West, brought about by the colonization of West Indies and, de facto, by establishing the conceptual limits of modernity/coloniality’ (Mignolo 2000: 29). The conceptual limits of modernity/coloniality do not only contribute to Western hegemony, but also set the framework for making sense of the difference. If one looks at the Turkish case in terms of Western modernity, one can only see the lack ascribed to it, for example, in modernisation theories. However, if one does the opposite and defines the phenomenon that does not fit into the existing conceptual frameworks, as Turkish difference, then there is excess. As I have discussed above, in both cases exceptionalism and the dichotomies that are behind it — such as culture/technology, spiritual/material — are at work. In the former approach, the Turkish example resists Western critical theory by falling out of the scope of historical change defined in Western terms (change has been conceived as external in Turkey, as I will discuss in Chapter Six). In the latter approach, one is confronted with excesses of meaning that remain inexplicable in terms of contemporary social theory: by treating the Turkish case as essentially different from Western modernity, one falls into the trap of relativism; the structuring mechanisms or the constitutive principles that delimit and represent difference remain unacknowledged. Furthermore, a relativistic approach does not

14

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

have any explanatory value in a case where it is obvious that technologies (such as radio broadcasting) and even concepts (such as modernity and nation) are Western imports. Therefore, a new conceptualisation is required to comprehend the historical interdependence between Turkey and the socalled West, without either collapsing particular differences into a dubious universalism, or celebrating particularisms for their own sake.25 Although I owe a great deal to the new trend of theorising in Turkey that takes the nation not as given but as a construct, my intention in this book is to deconstruct the Western model itself, by bringing the concepts of Occidentalism and Occidentalist fantasy into play. These concepts allow me to reflect on the very borders that demarcate East and West, and to deal not with distinct geographical territories or civilisations, but with dialogic configurations of culture and power. I try to open up a critical space in my analysis in-between the apparent dilemmas and dichotomies. Rather than looking for universal tendencies or deficiencies and errors in the Turkish case (which both deny historicity), I try to see how a certain subjectivity and the accompanying truth claims are dialogically produced and historically sustained within a complex material and discursive interdependence that allowed certain people, the elite,26 the privilege to employ technologies and speak for others and, hence, to represent them in terms of a modern national identity. Furthermore, Occidentalism as a hegemonic discourse offers the fantasy of sovereignty for its historically privileged subjects, in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity/religion. It provides them with a designated and officially sanctioned stage to perform and enact power. I would also argue that radio is a significant medium with which to study Occidentalism. Radio as a ‘foreign’ technology in Turkey introduces an important opening to what would otherwise be claustrophobic discourses, which equate the nation with its builders, as it were. Instead, the case of radio shows that other voices and desires are always on the air, and that national-political subjectivity is a site of fragmentation and splitting. Therefore, we need to shift the focus of analysis beyond the seemingly unified time and space of the nation and look at what the gaps and excesses reveal. Occidentalist Fantasy, Boundary Management, and Ankara Radio Occidentalism, as it is defined and employed in this book, is primarily a discourse of power, flexible enough to hold sway in the form of displaced resentments, fears, anxieties and oppositions. This complex dynamic has contributed to the persistence of Occidentalism over the years despite

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

15

changing circumstances, as I will discuss in the concluding chapter. The most manifest function of Occidentalism in Turkey has been and continues to be boundary management between East and West (albeit with changing meanings and borders), in order to justify the social divisions in the country. As James Carrier has put it, ‘Occidentalisms and orientalisms serve not just to draw a line between societies, but also to draw a line within them ... this process is likely to be particularly pronounced in societies that self-consciously stand on the border between occident and orient’ (Carrier 1995: 223). For example, the external border that separates Turkey from its East — that is, the Middle East — has been translated into an inner border that symbolically separates the West of Turkey from the ‘backward’ East, contaminated by Arabic, Kurdish and other cultures.27 One must also note that boundary management is not solely an internal affair, but resonates with the depictions of the Orientalist discourse that has positioned Turkey as a bridge between East and West. Turkey has always aspired to be an example of modernity for its neighbours in the Middle East. It has indeed attracted attention as an interesting model. As Bobby Sayyid has argued, ‘a great deal of intellectual energy in the Muslim world was devoted to discussions of Mustafa Kemal’s reforms and their general applicability in other Muslim territories’ (Sayyid 1997: 69-70). But, in fact, with the demise of Ottoman imperialism and the power to govern the territories that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire, Turkey lost most of its bargaining power to sustain its model as a good example,28 while it continually oscillated between being modern and traditional, namely East and West. The most stable identity of Turkey has been that of a bridge. This metaphor is so abundantly used in everything from scholarly texts to tourism brochures that it cannot be ignored as an ordinary narrative device; it demands further attention as a discursive construct with a long history, great complexity and durability. Turkey has been regarded, since at least the nineteenth century, as an ideal space where East and West meet.29 I contend that the notion of the bridge is more important as form than in any fixed meaning of the metaphor. In the performative enactment of the form, the bridge conveys not only multiple meanings, but also enables a certain subject position for the national elite. We can dwell on at least two meanings of the bridge here. Literally, the bridge is a spatial form that has a peculiar temporal identity; when a bridge connects two pieces of land, mobility between them is made possible. The first meaning, then, would be the mobility that the bridge enables. The literal meaning perfectly suits the purposes of tourism.30 However, it also evokes historical moments of movement between East and West: the mobility of Western capital and goods

16

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

that started systematically penetrating the Ottoman Empire from the eighteenth century onwards, together with the mobility of the travellers and Orientalists who crossed the bridge to find interesting and exotic ways of life in the Ottoman lands. Similarly, Ottomans started to travel to Europe at about the same time. Ottoman embassies were founded in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Many members of the ruling class travelled to European countries and came back with analyses of possible reasons for the Ottoman decline vis-à-vis Europe (Mardin 1991: 13). The dense mobility of goods, ideas and persons had a profoundly transformative impact; for example, it led to the establishment of a more systematic and political Orientalism in the West, as well as producing new concepts, imaginaries, and ways of life, and consequently Occidentalism in the Ottoman Empire and later in the new Turkish Republic. In its second meaning, the bridge functions as a figure that rhetorically constructs modern Turkish identity. It is even possible to refer to the bridge as synecdoche (a part standing in for the whole), with a special ontological function (Laclau 2005: 72). It is highly significant that the bridge as synecdoche, assumedly representative of the whole, is already divided in this context. Arrested in-between, modern Turkish identity has been constructed through a split: it is not only split due to being in-between East and West, but the split is also constitutive of its ontology.31 The sustained ambivalence about whether Turkey belongs to the East or the West, especially in the international political discourse, has defined the identity of Turkey as a new country emerging from the Ottoman Empire with more dependency on Western economy, sciences, and culture, and cut off from the Middle East which once belonged to the empire. Islam has played a significant role in this ambivalence. Islam was regarded as contradictory to Westernisation and modernity, both by Westerners and Turkish nationalists who aspired to be Westernised. Yet, as Bobby Sayyid has argued, Turkish nationalists (Kemalists) ‘found themselves in a paradoxical situation: to be western, one had to reject the Orient,’ but ‘their rejection of the Orient relied on them being able to articulate and perpetuate an oriental identity ... The only way to manage this paradox of westernizing and orientalizing was for the Kemalists to fix upon Islam the representation of Orientalness’ (Sayyid 1997: 69). Thus, Islamic life had to be re-codified and re-organised in the new regime. Simultaneously, laicism became the dominant ideology, which came to be almost synonymous with modern nationalism. ‘The Republican regime justified a tremendous amount of symbolic violence in the lives of the Muslim population, in changing dress styles, religious rituals, and cultural practice, as a necessity

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

17

for Turkey to become a modern nation’ (C. Ayd›n 2006: 452), and there has been an Islamic opposition from the very first days of the Republic. However, Islam was not altogether crushed or abandoned in the dominant ideology; on the contrary, the so-called modern nationalists positioned it as the implicit and repressed reference of Turkishness. It was utilised as the ultimate reference for shaping national policies, such as discriminatory policies and practices against non-Muslim citizens in Turkey, as evident in many traumatic examples in national history.32 Thus, the situation with regard to Islam has been more complex than the reigning division between laicists and Islamists in Turkey. According to Cemil Ayd›n, not only the Islamic opposition in Turkey, but also the conflicts among Islamists and pro-Western and laique nationalists have been legitimised by references to the West. ‘Both camps produced an occidentalist discourse of the West to formulate and legitimate their domestic reform agendas’ (C. Ayd›n 2006: 452). This complexity can be connected to the paradox that Sayyid mentions. However, I prefer not to call it a paradox; instead, I find it significant as an enabling performative discourse of power33 — namely, Occidentalism epitomised in the form of a bridge. Since the categories of East and West are both inside and outside, as signified by the metaphor of the bridge, it is clear that both should be incessantly re-produced and modified to hold the bridge in place. A bridge both connects and separates. The Occidentalist fantasy derives from the imagination that, by being a bridge, one can have access to both the essential identity of the nation and Western modernity. Despite its complications and often impossibility in practice, the rhetorical figure posits that East and West can be combined, and in this the elite has a significant role to play to create the ideal mix. Boundary management, with reference to the bridge as a synecdoche, informs the dynamics of Occidentalism in Turkey, as well as the political subjectivity of the elite. It positions Occidentalism as a performative discourse and even breeds an erotic fantasy (akin to a child’s phantasy), as suggested by Peyami Safa: If A. Suares expresses a certain truth when he signifies Asia as feminine and Europe as masculine, then we too, with a similar kind of imagination, can point to Turkey as the wedding bed, the most beautiful and masterful point of meeting between the two; and we can find the major synthesis, that is desperately sought in the post-war period, in ourselves (Safa 1990: 188-9; emphasis added).

18

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

The bridge then is also at the crossroads of Orientalism and Occidentalism in its localised form in Turkey. It enables the production of power in a performative and pragmatic fashion,34 with the desire to be recognised by Westerners as the legitimate child of East and West, although afflicted with the anxiety of never knowing what the imagined Western gaze really sees. Consequently, this produces resentment towards the West. In this book, I show how radio broadcasting provided a suitable and productive medium for the boundary management undertaken by the Turkish national elite. Radio did not only overcome physical boundaries through the dissemination of abstracted sounds, but it also became a performative medium for demarcating boundaries between the authentic and the artificial, as well as between different social groups, with the sole aim of managing these differences. This study regards radio as an eloquent and apt medium of Turkey’s identity as bridge, with its technological capacity to simultaneously produce, separate and connect both the desired and the feared. Radio broadcasting, which started in 1927 as a private enterprise in Turkey, was nationalised in 1938. In its initial years, radio was regarded as alien to Turkish culture. It was, as we shall see in Chapter Three, ‘too Western’ and ‘cosmopolitan,’ and especially associated with cultural life in Istanbul, which had been re-fashioned in the Tanzimat period to become the most modern westernised center of the empire (Çelik 1993). With the nationalisation of radio, the centre of broadcasting shifted from Istanbul to Ankara, the new capital of the Turkish Republic. In this shift, one can see more than a spatial movement. The cultural mission of radio, redefined towards the end of the 1930s and based in Ankara, has to be considered together with the meaning of the city of Ankara as opposed to Istanbul in the modern nationalist imaginary. The founding of the new republic in Ankara illustrates the performative character of nationalism, and the feeling of urgency that accompanied it, ‘to work for something which did not exist as if it existed and make it exist,’ as fierif Mardin has argued. According to Mardin, ‘nation’ and ‘Western civilisation’ were two fundamental code words for this effort (Mardin 1981: 200). It was not just a question of military strategy that influenced the decision to make Ankara the new capital in the course of the National Struggle. Ankara represented the ‘ground zero’ of the nation, at an equal and necessary symbolic distance from both the West and the imperial past. Furthermore, being based in a town in Anatolia, the new capital would enable the government to ‘bring civilization’ to those ‘backward’ parts of the country (Ad›var 1994: 47). Ankara provided an empty space for the construction of the nation. The national ideas and practices were to be inscribed on a blank page

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

19

— as opposed to the highly contested and ancient history of Istanbul35 — of this little barren town.36 The members of what eventually made up the national elite mostly came from Istanbul to assume national tasks in the Ankara government.37 The conception of the town as ‘empty’ was in many ways similar to colonial ideology, which notoriously refused to acknowledge already-existing ways of life in the colonised territory as civilised.38 The Westernised forms of entertainment, the concerts, balls, theatre and opera performances that the elite enjoyed in Ankara were strictly isolated from the rest of the population. Although this was not an extraordinary situation, considering that a rigid demarcation of elite culture occurs in many other similar contexts, the significant point is that the elite in Ankara was not fully content with this division, according to their own accounts of those years. They were torn between a Western but artificial life,39 and an authentic but alien local life. Nationalism was a mission of synthesis, or bridging, an extremely challenging mission under those unfavourable conditions. ‘Life in Ankara is a draft,’ said Falih R›fk› Atay (1969: 415). Another member of the elite in Ankara, a famous Turkish journalist-to-be, Nadir Nadi complained to Mustafa Kemal that Ankara was so vacant that it was like a desert. Mustafa Kemal’s reply interestingly revealed the secret formula of nationalism: What seems vacant is actually full; there is a dormant and strong life in this realm which is perceived as a desert. This is the nation, the Turkish nation. What is missing is organisation, and now we are working on it (Abal›o¤lu 1955: 97, emphasis added).40 However, despite the idealised targets set for the ‘vacant yet full’ Ankara — such as ‘to make it a clean, beautiful, green, magnificent, organised and civilized city’ (fienyap›l› 1985: 49) — Ankara turned out to be a socially hybrid place.41 It was under those circumstances that Ankara Radio became a significant instrument helping to bridge the gap between the idealised and the experienced. Ankara Radio assumed the role of the ‘voice of the nation’ towards the end of the 1930s, while Istanbul Radio closed down, not re-opening until 1949. Ankara Radio provided the technology and the medium for recoding time and space, and for imagining the everyday life of the nation. Radio broadcasting attempted to erase the memory of the past and instead create simulated experiences and emotions. Compared to the ongoing reforms in the country, which aimed to nationalise/modernise social and cultural life (through the new civil code, the language revolution, the new dress code, new schools and institutions of education, the adoption of international time

20

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

and calendar as well as system of measures), experimenting and performing with sounds seemed a much easier task. The reach of the attempted changes in such a short time remained rather limited, and the Republican People’s Party (RPP) as the designer of the reforms could not protect itself from negative labels, such as ‘elitist.’42 However, radio in its address to the whole nation, even to the whole world, could easily break down obstacles and present a completely different view through manufactured sound. Therefore, the starting point of radio broadcasting was more realistic than the ground zero of Ankara as the nation’s microcosm. The radio studio provided the isolated space and the techniques with which it would be possible to transform the vacant into the full. Consequently, radio was regarded as a significant instrument for modernising the population. The state or the party, which were almost identical at that time, had to have a central hold on all broadcasting facilities, so that it could defend the principles of inkilâp,43 both towards outside and inside, with ‘a vengeance and determined boldness.’44 However, radio was not only the vehicle to produce and shape the nation; at that same time, it also produced and shaped those who were engaged in imagining that very nation. Nationalism in Turkey had to attend first to disciplining its own selected members,45 who represented the nation in Ankara, but had difficulties in coping with the conditions of nation-building. It is not a mere coincidence that in most of the memoirs of the broadcasters of this period Ankara Radio is depicted as a school. While producing the national culture, the elite positioned themselves as the mediators between West and East, high culture and folk culture; yet, in their very activity they themselves were subjected to a thorough sentimental and cultural re-education. They had many tasks, which first applied to them and their friends and family. For example, love of the nation had to be created; domestic life and gender roles were to be redefined in nationalist terms; and the education of children and youth had to be posed as a national concern. The most significant aspects of the Occidentalist boundary management can be observed in this process, which will gain more substance in the discussion of radio talks and dramas in Chapters Five and Six. Looking at the specific space defined by radio broadcasting, especially in its early years, allows me to deconstruct the seemingly monolithic expressions of the official discourse in Turkey. It thus becomes possible to reveal the dialogism in the discourses and practices at work. Radio broadcasting provides important clues for this because its use as a medium of totalisation to reach all — that is, those in the centre and on the periphery; the elite and the people; men and women — by crossing rigid social boundaries could contradict the political concerns of the elite to maintain the boundaries. The

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

21

contradiction is between an idealised totality inherent in Occidentalist fantasy and the complex reality saturated with power relations. Radio and the Dialogical Leakage Until very recently, radio broadcasting in Turkey was run by the state. Until 1994, the law did not permit either private or independent broadcasting.46 Broadcasting was also highly centralised; radio stations were concentrated mostly in major urban centres — such as Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir — and very little was permitted to occur outside the grip of the centre.47 Yet, in its early years radio was regarded by many — including the broadcasters, bureaucrats, and politicians, and partly also the audience — as the voice of the nation. This is of course not unique to Turkish broadcasting. It is well documented that radio figured significantly in building and sustaining the life of the nation, mainly until the end of the 1950s in Europe and the United States (Barfield 1996; Briggs 1961; 1965; Cain 1992; Crisell 1997; Hilliard and Keith 1997; Hilmes 1997; Scannell and Cardiff 1991). In Turkey, too, radio broadcasting until the 1950s can be interpreted within the same framework. However, one should question whether these two variables always discussed in relation to radio — communication and nation — can be conceived independently of one another. My research on early radio broadcasting in Turkey has produced enough evidence to show that radio was not merely an instrument to realise a defined national project. It was, more specifically, a medium through which the modern nation could be imagined by the elite, against their recurring doubts about the reality of the nation’s existence. Radio technology, capable of producing an imagination beyond the limits of seeing, played a key role in this. As Burhan Belge, a broadcaster as well as journalist and politician in 1940s Turkey, has said, the most important aspect of radio is to ‘see with the ear.’ Belge has argued that ‘radio leaves you free to imagine the people as beautiful as their voices.’48 When looking back at the history of radio broadcasting in Turkey, we can understand how important this idea of ‘seeing with the ear’ was, since it prepared the very ground for broadcasters to attempt to ‘make’ the modern nation via talking or experimenting with sounds on the airwaves. However, this was also a source of frustration, since most often what was ‘seen by the ear’ stood in direct contradiction to what was ‘seen by the eye.’ While the elite were inclined to take the dream for the real and replace the desire with the fact, thanks to the sounds produced by modern technology, it was not all that easy to match imagined reality with lived experiences, including those of the broadcasters. The radio technology of the West allowed experimentation in the domain of the audible, to man-

22

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

ufacture the modern nation, yet these aural representations could not fully contain the visible, which through the gaze of the West had already been depicted as Oriental (as seen in Orientalist art and literature, as well as political discourse). The broadcasters’ own narratives often have telling cracks and gaps, as will be discussed in Chapter Three. I would further claim that the gap between the aural imagination and the lived reality as it occurs in radio broadcasting is itself a source of knowledge. Reading the imagined reality against the specific experiences of time and space in this framework not only reveals the practical dimension of the socalled nation-building, but also helps to guide us in mapping the discourses that had already penetrated the borders of the nation. We could advance a broader and a more critical approach to the national project, if we thought of the reality of representations alongside a reality that cannot be officially represented. This book pays attention to this gap and aims to account for it by problematising the series of interconnected oppositions mentioned earlier — namely, East/West, culture/civilisation, spiritual/material, and organic/artificial — that need to be further analysed in reference to the particularities of radio technology. I agree with Michele Hilmes who, in writing on broadcasting in the USA between 1922 and 1952, has viewed ‘radio not as a collection of wires, transmitters, and electrons but as a social practice grounded in culture, rather than in electricity ...’ (Hilmes 1997: xiii). But we should not regard radio as solely belonging to a field of culture that excludes technicalities and material arrangements. Radio, at the same time, is ‘wires, transmitters, and electrons.’ The broadcaster entertains a certain political imagination regarding his/her subject position and the audience’s, with the help of the technology of radio broadcasting. As Raymond Williams has argued in the case of writing, the technology of a certain medium of expression influences ‘conditions of composition: the kinds of “audience” or “reader” in mind or addressed; the available forms and conventions; the state of the language itself’ (Williams 1991: 3). Therefore, the technical aspects — such as the location and strength of transmitters; the quality of the transmission of radio voices; and of course, the problem of distortion; as well as the questions of format (the structure of radio talks or radio dramas) — were regarded as heavily charged with national meanings in Turkish radio broadcasting, similar to other cases in Europe and the USA. The technical played a key role in managing the boundaries that distinguished the national elite from a (feminised and infantilised) mass audience; and the national culture from that of religious and ethnic minorities, as well as from other national cultures. Technology delineated the temporal, spatial and social borders. For example, by transmitting

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

23

sounds to a broad geographical area, radio technology produced and defined the so-called masses (although its reach was technically limited in most instances), a distinctive trait of national cultures at the beginning of the twentieth century.49 Different from writing, radio also played a role in the advent of capitalism in ‘the twentieth-century transition from a culture based on conservation to one of consumption’ (Hilmes 1997: xiv). Finally, it redefined and re-established social distinctions and divisions — radio mobilised different segments of society by means of different strategies for similar targets and desires, while constructing the mass in its common address. One can see in radio the working of a grand design of power, as well as of micro-adjustments in order to speak to particular audiences. While Turkish broadcasters invested in the former aspect for building and shaping the nation from top to bottom, they interestingly interpreted the latter as democracy. For example, Burhan Belge thought of radio as a democratic medium ‘as if it was invented for the people itself.’50 Similarly, according to another broadcaster of the 1940s, Nurettin Artam, radio was a ‘smooth’ medium: it did not force people; it provided both utility and pleasure ‘without necessarily tiring eyes or bothering bodies.’51 However, democracy could also be dangerous; if individuals did not tune into the national channel but preferred to listen to other stations, power’s grand design would fail. If nobody listened to national radio, then the voice of the nation would be suffocated in the studio. For example, the so-called music reform in Turkish Radio was informed by this very anxiety. I will discuss the construction of the genre of folk music, realised by Turkifying and modernising carefully selected local folk music, in Chapter Three. The new genre was introduced simply because people were found to be tuning in to ‘Oriental music’ on Arabic radio stations, instead of Turkish radio broadcasting Western music. This example reveals the obsession of national broadcasters to define and manage the spatial and temporal boundaries of the modern nation; yet, it also exposes the futility of their efforts at control. There are, and have been, too many competing force fields over the sounds on the air. I will examine the particular dynamics of these sound wars, if we may call them that, in Chapter Four, where I will discuss the strategies of the BBC Turkish Section for coining and targeting Turks as an audience, thus rivalling Turkish radio stations. Radio cannot function without the illusion that it is addressing a particular audience and that its programming is shaped according to the different demands and tastes of this audience. The target audience is usually classified under certain categories to sustain the illusion. Considerations of gender and

24

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

age differences have been pivotal for the radio output in Turkey. There was an awareness that radio was heard mostly at home, which was considered ‘the women’s place.’52 Thus, one of the leading missions of Turkish radio was to create new and modern family relations. Alien technology entered the domain of the intimate with the aim to re-structure particularly gender roles and relations, again exposing the intricate negotiations between the modern (Western) and the national. All the above-mentioned features of radio as a technology contributed to a series of tensions in the production of radio output in Turkey. The first tension concerns the questions as to whether radio was an instrument of leisure (entertainment/art) or public service (politics/education). As a medium that has been shaped by and in the service of consumer culture, national policies and wars,53 radio could not easily exalt itself to the level of art. It was not only contaminated by politics and propaganda, but it also had ordinary business functions to fulfil. Nonetheless, radio had to be creative and entertaining in order to attract its intended audiences. Another tension concerns the discursive style of radio. Radio had to incorporate ordinary everyday culture (the rhetorical devices of political speeches would be inappropriate for a medium that simulates everydayness), but the ordinary had to be specially processed in the studio and presented in the desired format and tone to signify a distinct national culture, if radio was talking to the nation and not just to any individual. However, given that there were different audiences in different parts of the country, radio had to introduce a plurality of forms for the sake of having an impact on the audience. Official rhetoric and populism proved challenging to reconcile.54 We can argue that radio is both a form of mass communication and a simulated individual communication (Bachelard 1993: 220). The simultaneous totalising and individualising address of radio broadcasting resembles the strategies of liberal governmentality that Foucault has analysed (1991c), but with a significant difference. Radio governs the masses not only through specified practices, techniques and knowledge, but also through fantasy, displacement and non-knowledge, as we will see in the various examples pertaining to early Turkish Radio. The most distinct feature of radio is its capacity to surpass material obstacles and barriers with its sound waves, to re-produce the reality at another level through the play of sounds. Nezih Manyas, a Turkish broadcaster, has captured this feature by using a metaphor of war, which emphasises both speed and force: ‘radio cuts through the difficulties of time and distance by its “blitzkrieg.’’’55 Berland has put it in more scholarly terms: ‘Radio redefines space and structures time not only in its acoustic movement over distances but also in its format’

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

25

(Berland 1993: 209). Thus, radio exists in a temporally redefined space. The format of radio privileges the moment of now and here and is located inbetween the intimate and the public spheres; art and education; spiritual and material life; information and entertainment. Radio’s immateriality allows it to cross these boundaries with ease (Hilmes 1997: 15). It is, at the same time, giving life and body to what is in fact a void, the studio (‘the isolated rooms,’ in the Turkish broadcasters’ idiom), and disembodying the sound messages ‘that are disparate in terms of their location of origin, their cultural purpose, and their form, in order to create a continuous enveloping rhythm of sound and information’ (Berland 1993: 211). Radio as a technology provokes a dream of massive and extensive control over the people, yet the intended control by the elite over the masses was difficult, if not impossible, to achieve through radio. The responses of listeners have remained mostly unknown and uncertain. The quality and reliability of radio receivers may have been less than imagined. All these uncertainties led to worries and anxieties amongst radio broadcasters. Radio, in its attempt to create a virtual visibility in the isolation of the studio, provided a highly controlled account of reality, but it was not easy to conceal that the presented reality was imagined through sounds, which were mostly produced by performances and effects in the studio. Radio has its ‘dialogic leakage,’ if we may use Pechey’s term from another context (Pechey 1989), which conveys the efforts of totalisation and their failure. It paves the way to reflect on the connections between fantasy and reality. For this very reason, the study of radio broadcasting makes it possible to extend the seemingly fixed boundaries of the official national discourse and reveal their dialogic construction and management in the framework of Occidentalism. The Main Arguments and Organisation of the Book I have argued that the seemingly rigid official discourse in Turkey was in a pragmatic way adapted to different concerns, in reference to the negotiation, or more particularly the bridge, between East and West. In this respect, I emphasise the need to look at techniques and practices and not only at ideological narratives. However, if one looks closely at the narratives of the nation, one can even see the traces of pragmatism there. For example, civilisation had to come from the West to Turkey, in fact, for pragmatic reasons,56 in order to survive and be accepted as a national community in the eyes of the West. On the other hand, the glorified conception of the people, which according to the ideology embodied the essential culture,57 also had its pragmatic extensions. While the conception of the purity of the people served as a vantage point from which to judge and accuse the critical intellectuals for

26

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

being alien to the people, the glorification of the people went hand in hand with a diagnosis of the impurity of the people: they had diverse ethnic origins, languages and disparate local traditions. There was a need to smooth out or, in other words, repress their differences into one single coherent identity. This diversity also made it necessary to educate them and further keep them under control, always justified by the need of being national and modern at the same time. In relation to this constant differentiation and negotiation, there emerge different registers of truth in Turkey: ‘truth as a display,’ or ‘truth as a form,’ has been separate but not independent from ‘truth as intimacy,’ to which I refer as external and internal registers of truth, respectively. The external register of truth was rigorously maintained in order to justify the slippery ground of practices at the intimate level, while the internal truth gave substance to an otherwise empty and unconvincing form of display. In Chapter Two, I will discuss the historical conditions of the pragmatic negotiations of Western modernity and the consequent conception or a crisis of history in Turkey. I will attempt to theorise the missing archives of Turkish Radio and in Turkey in general, as a symptom of the two different registers of truth. This will lead to an elaboration on Occidentalism, history and political subjectivity. The political subjectivity in building, defining, and distinguishing national identity in Turkey has been shaped in reference to an imagined Western-ness and Western gaze. Here, the West should not be taken as a geographical marker. Rather, it shifts so as to mean Europe or the USA in different periods and contexts; it can also refer to a part of Turkey (for instance, Istanbul has always been a centre of attraction coded as the West). In Chapter Three, by attending to the history of Turkish Radio and its national meanings associated with Ankara, I will attempt to show how Occidentalism entails boundary management, not only between different countries, but also between cities and regions within the country. Furthermore, it maintains distinctions based on class, gender, ethnicity and religion. All these differences are marked and justified within a frame of a dichotomous East and West. I will argue that radio broadcasting has contributed to the above dynamics by providing an appropriate medium and technology. The simultaneous disembodiment and embodiment of sounds through radio made it possible to construct the voice of the nation that would be heard by the Others, both the external West and the internal East — namely, the people. But, as I mentioned before, the representation of reality produced in the radio was not always convincing, even for its producers. Every experience and contestation over the representation, such as in the case of the BBC Turkish section broadcasts, led to anxiety and frustra-

RADIO TECHNOLOGY, MODERNITY AND NATION

27

tion. However, this does not point to the failure of the Occidentalist fantasy. Just the opposite: the constant ambition to construct this ideal mix of Eastern-ness and Western-ness and to defend it against others — that is, to signify and perform the modern-national — has produced the group identity of the national elite. In this respect, radio has indeed been a school for many. In Chapter Four, I will discuss the BBC Turkish section broadcasts, based on archival research on the service from its inauguration in 1939 until the 1950s. The strategies of the British to know and influence the Turkish audience provide significant data to understand how actually the ‘copy’ is designed together with the ‘model.’ The Occidentalist fantasy was structured within an encounter with the West, which had imposed a model for modernity in its colonialist and imperialistic history and which reproduced itself always against an insufficient copy. Thus, I argue that the Occidentalist fantasy is not a mere invention of the Turkish elite, but that it has been dialogically shaped as a practice answering to the Western model of modernity. It continuously adjusts national identity to make it authentic vis-à-vis the management of the model by the Westerners. In other words, despite the pragmatism involved, the national discourse was not voluntarily created, as the imitation problematic would claim. So-called Westernisation and modernisation were put on the agenda of the Turkish national elite by means of a threat, ‘by convincing Turks of past and present inadequacy’ (R. Davison 1990: 92). The greatest paradox of Occidentalist national identity then concerns the substance of Western-ness. The West is both within and without; it signifies the desire to be both same and different. From a certain politicised perspective, it would be desirable to eradicate the difference from the external West (namely, Europe or the USA), due to its disturbing connotations, such as belatedness and backwardness in terms of modernity. But there is another perspective, which would have the internal West consolidating its differences from the external West in order to claim national sovereignty. In Chapters Five and Six, I will analyse radio talks and radio dramas, respectively, to discuss how a gendered conception of ‘nature,’ ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ figures in Occidentalism with regard to maintaining the delicate balance of national sovereignty with the desired, yet instrumentalised historical change. Finally, in the concluding section, referring to several persistent themes and examples in Turkey, I will argue that Occidentalism is not just a complex play of identities, but that it provides a grammar of power by continuously evoking the history of the dichotomous East and West sedimented in

28

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

culture. Furthermore, we can see that in very different social and political instances in Turkish history the national and the modern are played against each other: different people and segments of society are categorised either as ‘national but not modern,’ or ‘modern but not national’ and cast as Others. To this day, Occidentalist fantasy plays a very important role in the continuity of hegemonic power relations. Hence, I find it an urgent task to understand and criticise Occidentalism, not only in its historical forms, but also in terms of its persistence, in order to work through history and find an opportunity for a new imagination beyond the double bind of nationalism and modernity, East and West.

2 OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

I remember a young poet. Pounding his fists on his chest, he once said, ‘I don’t want to be a Turk. Everything I see around burns my skin just like a hot iron does, in such a horrifying way. With my art and emotional capacity I belong to another — a Western environment.’ Atilla ‹lhan, Hangi Bat›?

I would like to start this chapter with the archives and their dubious status in Turkey as a way of introducing my attempt to further historicise and theorise Occidentalism. My research diary specifically informs my narrative on the missing archives, pointing to a routine destruction, or, at best, indifference to public archives in Turkey. What I mean by ‘missing’ is not the literal non-existence of archives, but their social insignificance for national history, as they are often and easily dismissed as irrelevant.1 The term ‘missing archives’ is also a native category, since the misfortunes of archival documents constitute a topic for daily conversation, circulating stories and narratives in Turkey. The following analysis aims to locate the question of archives within a larger scope that engages with the theoretical discussion of Occidentalism and its relation to modern history and political subjectivity. I contend that the problem of archives in Turkey poses challenging questions to social theory. All too often, social theory is used to provide a framework in which empirical analysis is situated. Theory contextualises; history and empirical work exemplifies. Instead, my theorising is in constant tension with the historical data; rather than smoothing out the impurities, mismatches, and gaps within the data with the help of the terms of given theoretical concepts, it attempts to make the very problem its object of analysis, which necessarily implies a rethinking of theory. The concepts

30

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

employed here mostly come from the Western human sciences, such as sociology, psychoanalysis, and linguistics. But they are put into work to treat a particular set of practices and texts in a non-Western part of the world. This involves a re-narrativisation of modernity, extending and transposing its limits outside Western parameters (Hall 1996: 250). Thus, I focus on the question of temporality to interrogate how the mythical and generic time of national history (and modernity) displaces experiential time (Herzfeld 1997: 21). In this way, the shades of conceptual metaphors are revealed, which may, in turn, shed light on those temporal zones of modernity which are unaccounted for within the confines of Western scientific inquiry. Archives centrally, yet problematically figure in the conception of modern history. Modern history severs the past from the present and transforms the past into a dead object of knowledge.2 The tension that the present holds with history, reified in the form of a discourse on the dead, is best observed in the way in which the positivist historiography conceives of the archive. The archive is treated in chronological and linear history, envisaged by modern historiography as both the transparent source and gatekeeper of truth. The archive, while establishing and authenticating the past, at the same time destroys its actuality through a systematic re-codification of the life embodied in the archives, all informed by a particular logic of power. In Harootunian’s words, ‘by incorporating the events into history, it is the purpose of tradition to level out, ease the sudden starts, and naturalize the historical productions. Beneath the historical present, however, lie the specters, the phantoms, waiting to reappear and upset it’ (Harootunian 2000: 19). It is to these spectres that I will now turn to in my account of the missing archives, in order to understand the crisis of universalised historical representation in Turkey. The Missing Archives As I have mentioned in the introduction, my initial perspective when I first started my research on the early years of radio broadcasting in Turkey was a comparative one inspired by Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991). My question was the following: In what ways did radio broadcasting as a modern technology serve to imagine the Turkish nation in the period of its consolidation, particularly from the beginning of the 1930s until the end of the 1940s? Radio addressed the people as the mass, while assuming that it was possible to be simultaneously heard by the West, hence negating the temporal differences both within society, and between Turkey and the West. The standardisation of language, the signification of national time and space, the invention of a past, and the codification of a national memo-

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

31

ry all appeared as meaningful objects of analysis in this comparative framework. However, the research itself brought up several new issues that did not quite fit into the initial research design. Even if we take ‘modernity as form,’ in Osborne’s terms (1995),3 or, in other words, an abstract temporal structure instead of a particular historical experience, we can see that there were lots of practical failures in the emergence of the form of modernity in Turkey — failures when comparing Turkey, for example, to Britain. These problems constitute tensions between history and theory. Before elaborating on this question, let me give a brief account of my research diary and the failures emerging within it. I started my research by first visiting the library of the TRT (Turkish Radio and Television),4 to look at the publications on the history of Turkish radio broadcasting. I had no doubt that the librarian would guide me in searching the vast amount of material that I was hoping to find. What I found instead was a librarian completely uninterested in and quite ignorant of the history of radio broadcasting in the specialised library of the institution, which had a very small number of publications on the subject of radio broadcasting in Turkey. The institution seemed to function without historical documentation, in the ever-present, just like the radio itself. Yet, I kept up my hopes that the archives department could help me reach the historical archives. The situation in the archives department and, later, my interviews with broadcasters and administrators further complicated the picture. Although a few selected sound recordings of radio programmes existed in the archives, they were not catalogued according to date. These were mostly the speeches of national leaders on radio, saved solely for the purpose of rebroadcasting them. In an interview, the General Director of Press and Publications Bureau told me, off the record: ‘This institution does not keep organised — either sound or written — archives; most of the old materials have been destroyed either due to neglect or to the obsessive wish of cleaning the place by newly appointed directors.’5 ‘Cleaning’ the place is an interesting phrase in this account, known to be a common practice in many public institutions in Turkey. ‘Cleaning’ usually means ridding the institution of the materials and documents belonging to the previous director’s period of duty. Although it implies a very particularistic relation to the past, in the sense that history starts anew with each new director, it can also be interpreted as a modern attitude that sets the past clearly apart from the present. Yet, the act of privileging the present as a blank page constitutes moments of disruption and destruction in the history of the institution, and also of the nation in a larger framework. In other words, history is discontinuous and full of ruptures and holes, as it were. The

32

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

particular experience of the modern in this context and the resulting conception of history and historicity need further analysis, to which I will return in the following pages. The ‘holes’ that disrupt the continuity of history are not without life, however; they are filled with lived experiences told in personal stories. What struck me in the numerous confessional stories of archive destruction in my research was the taken-for-granted nature of the discontinuity. Another significant point was the enjoyment that accompanied the stories of destruction. I heard many stories, told with pleasure, of how the old records of broadcast programmes in Ankara Radio were broken in halves for easy storage; how they were distributed to the members of the staff, who turned them into objects of decoration, such as wall clocks. I was told that the written archives had been abandoned in storage rooms for years, to be progressively destroyed by rats, while the remaining ones were destroyed by the military after the coups of 1971 and 1980. The administrators — for example, the director of Ankara Radio whom I interviewed — did not try to refute these stories; instead, he wanted to convince me that there were no existing archives in the radio. When combined with the fact that most of the broadcasters who worked in radio in the 1930s and 1940s were no longer alive, the dramatic absence of archives was clearly disabling any research, apart from leaving me with a significant theoretical question: How to interpret the destruction of archives in an institution which claims to represent the nation? But when turning to the personal stories, there is a different register of experiences. For example, a former sound engineer of Ankara Radio, Ertu¤rul ‹mer, conveyed very interesting and indeed specific information regarding archives in his interview.6 He was quite sure that there were some old records of programmes in the Ankara Radio building. ‘They must be still there,’ he said and drew a little map on a piece of paper to describe the place where he had seen these records years ago.

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

33

Guided by this informal map that relied on memory, I found my way in the Ankara radio building almost like a detective and finally discovered a number of precious old records of programmes from the 1940s behind a cupboard. The director of Ankara Radio seemed rather surprised by this discovery. But when he kindly agreed to make copies of these old records for me (considering me a ‘foreigner,’ since I was affiliated with the University of London), I could see no sign that he was keen to protect these newly discovered precious records as part of the institution’s archives. The stories of destruction that I personally witnessed are parallel to Uygur Kocabaflo¤lu’s much earlier account of his research on radio in the late 1970s. In fact, he introduces his book on Turkish Radio (1980) by pointing to the problem of archives. His most significant point is not just about the absence of archives; what is more thought-provoking in his account, which to a great extent echoes mine,7 is the mismatch between the official reflex immediately responding with the claim ‘there are no archives,’ and the existence of the scattered documents. Kocabaflo¤lu found documents that ‘have remained in complete disorder in storage rooms or cupboards. The relevant departments of neither the General Director of the Press and Publications Bureau, nor the TRT are aware of their presence’ (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: v-vi). But could these documents in disarray be labelled as archival documents? To the extent that they are not incorporated into the institutional structure, they are in fact neither keeping order nor giving an order for thinking about the past, the present and the future, as Derrida would say (1996). Just the opposite: these were documents that could escape from the process of cleaning and ordering, and probably once ‘caught,’ they had less of a chance of survival. The above incidents and narratives clearly reveal an indifference to archive-keeping, but they also enact an oral archiving of repression or destruction. The accounts of memory, even of the administrators, bear a certain kind of distrust of the power of the archives for the politics of the institution. As archives seem to embody an alien and distanced truth, the politics seem to lie elsewhere. My interviews with some former broadcasters who worked in radio (unfortunately not in the period under study, but soon thereafter) were an attempt to compensate the gaps in the official archives. I thought that these interviews could provide some data about the past. However, a striking and repeating theme that surfaced in most of the interviews was, in fact, parallel to that of the destruction of the institutional archives: the personalisation of the past. Most of my interviewees, who worked in radio starting from the mid-1950s,8 thought that the past was not that important anyway; for

34

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

example, they were very astonished about my wish to study radio broadcasting in the 1940s. Most of them thought that radio broadcasting in those years had just been an amateur activity that reflected only the viewpoints of a group of people through primitive formats, and that ‘there was no real programming.’ They believed that it was only in the 1960s, and only with them, that radio broadcasting took its modern shape. The establishment of the TRT as the centralised nation-wide institution of television and radio broadcasting in 1964 possibly provided a prism through which the past was labelled as less professional. However, their accounts of the past mostly contradict the facts in existing documents and research.9 Yet, it is not my aim here to discuss the accuracy of these accounts. More significant, in my view, is that they all convey a certain indifference to history and instead focus on personal achievements or conflicts. They rest on the circular time of memory rather than the linear time of history. One can also observe the personalisation of the past in the radio programmes broadcast on TRT radio in the 1970s and 1980s about the history of Turkish Radio.10 These programmes utilised some archived sound recordings, but were mostly based on the memoirs of radio broadcasters and performers. Therefore, they are ‘radio memoirs,’ rather than archival programmes. For instance, most often in these programmes no specific dates were given for cited events, and there is no attempt to classify data by any general criteria, such as the genre of programmes; the history of radio broadcasting in these programmes usually refers to the period prior to the foundation of the TRT. These programmes were composed by compiling interesting events charged with emotions. The history of radio was approached nostalgically in these programmes, but the memoirs also evoke funny and childish incidents that allude to the poor conditions and failures in and on radio then. Through stories that narrate little funny incidents — for example, about a little mouse that scared the news presenter, the harsh but fatherly discipline of the administrators, and broadcasters playing tricks on each other — the history of radio is turned into a collection of personalised stories. History is also infantilised in this context, in which radio is regarded mainly as a school. I would like to refer to two excerpts from these programmes to give a better sense of the personalisation of history. The first example is the narration of a live relay that was supposed to take place at a nightclub in Istanbul. When the famous radio presenter Orhan Boran (who worked for radio starting in 1945) and his team arrived at this nightclub and understood that the live relay could not be technically accomplished due to the location of the place and the inadequacy of the transmitters, the team moved to a hill and

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

35

simulated a whole night of entertainment by playing records, making noise and sound effects, such as clapping, and pretending that they were actually broadcasting from the nightclub. Here we see a childish imagination provoked by the technology of radio broadcasting; the way in which the memoir is brought to words by Orhan Boran after so many years prioritises the personal stories to imply the failing technical and organisational structure of the institution.11 But the ‘failures’ may not be that innocent. In a second memoir, we see that the state authorities could criminalise failures. Hayri Esen (an actor who took part in radio dramas starting in 1943) tells the story of the live broadcasting of a radio drama about 19 May (in official history, this is the day when Mustafa Kemal landed in Samsun and started the national war of independence). In the play, Hayri Esen in the role of the father told his children to turn on the radio to listen to the speech of the national leader; then, there was a pause for a few minutes because the sound engineer upstairs was busy reading a book and did not notice the sign that asked her to turn on the recorded speech. Hayri Esen reported that the police interrogated them for this failure.12 The tension between national sensitivity and technical failure is noteworthy. How to explain these and other failures? In a comparative perspective, they could have been accounted for by referring to objective and technical factors. The inability to keep ordered archives, the lack of discipline and organisational efficiency may then be symptoms of a non-modern and irrational institution, for example, if we consider it in the framework of Weber’s arguments about the role of archives, objective rules and impersonal hierarchies replacing and regulating personal relations in modern Western bureaucracy.13 From a modernisation perspective, the personalisation of history could easily be connected to a lack of technical development, or to Oriental mentalities that are not compatible with the modern operations of power. Thus, the general question of failure and particularly the dubious status of archives in Turkey become inevitably part of a debate on modernity. However, as I have argued above, a comparison with the Western model is problematic, because it fails to take notice of the dialogism of the model and the copy. The intertwined histories of the West and the non-West bear on particular cultural characteristics; that is to say, what is considered genuinely belonging to Turkish culture was already re-shaped by Western modalities of thinking and acting through Westernisation, before it appeared as an object of analysis in modern theory. Then the question is historical rather than essentially cultural. For example, in order to understand that the question of archives in Turkey is indeed a modern one, one can note that the Ottoman Empire rigorously maintained an archive, when compared

36

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

to modern Turkey.14 The Turkish archivists’ journal provides an insider perspective on this: ‘although the tradition of archive keeping is very old in Turkey, because the subject has been neglected in the Republican period and there has been a rupture in the tradition, archiving in Turkey could not reach the development of the West.’15 The West figures in this statement as both the ideal and, implicitly, the source of the problem. It would also be misleading to point to the destruction of archives simply as a method of censorship to ‘enforce right-thinking homogeneity,’ as Marvin would say regarding the issue of preservation and modern media (Marvin 1988: 204). Despite the apparent censorship of archives concerning nationally sensitive issues, among which the question of the Armenian Genocide ranks first,16 I would like to draw attention to an attitude towards archive-keeping in Turkey that cannot be directly explained by censorship. What I have tried to sketch in the above paragraphs has more to do with heterogeneity (in terms of scattered and non-ordered documents and personalised stories) than enforced homogeneity. Hence, I suggest conceiving of the various symptoms of failure, not in terms of a cultural deficiency or only as a form of censorship, but as the very production of a certain register of truth within the performative discourse of Occidentalism. Before delving into this discussion I would like to say a few words about the final episode of my research diary in the BBC Written Archives. My initial reason for visiting the BBC Archives was to find documents that could provide me with information about the history of Turkish Radio, given the poor condition of the archives of Turkish Radio. The vast amount of archival material on the BBC Turkish Service was in radical contrast to the situation in the Turkish Radio archives. The BBC documents were not only rich in their range, but also well-classified and ordered.17 Yet, they contained highly subjective content: obviously politically incorrect comments on Turkish people and life, explicit political concerns of propaganda, detailed strategies to capture the Turkish audience, and endless worries regarding the efficiency of the strategies, as I will discuss in Chapter Four. The BBC archives, beyond providing me with information on Turkish Radio, opened up a domain of politics as such. My initial reaction, after having contemplated the destruction of archives in the Turkish case, was: Why should the BBC keep such documents that reveal politics so openly? The documents could, one imagines, make the institution accountable. However, as I was thinking about the events of the 1930s and 1940s while doing my research in the mid-1990s, the BBC was busy establishing itself as a multicultural media institution and pondering new ways of addressing and containing multiculturalism,18 severed from all connotations

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

37

of Britain’s imperial and colonial past. The ‘truth’ produced within a dominant paradigm of power, Britain still regarded as a model-setting representative of Western modernity, has its value as long as it is not challenged from within its own procedures of construction. The ‘truth’ guarded by the BBC archives is the naturalised and universalised discourse of humanism in British modernity, contested but still in power. Although one can trace through the archives how the discourse of humanism has been constructed as part of power practices, as I will do in the case of the BBC Turkish Service in Chapter Four, the archives, however well kept, are not a part of present actuality in Britain due to the power of history as an externalised realm. Heidegger gives an illuminating perspective on the connection of history and actuality: ‘every report of the past ... is concerned with something that is static. This kind of historical reporting is an explicit shutting down of history, whereas it is, after all, a happening. We question historically if we ask what is still happening even if it seems to be past’ (Heidegger 1967: 43). In the Turkish case, however, the ‘truth’ has been a product of ongoing negotiations under the actual as well as the imagined Western gaze, as we will see in the discussion of Turkey’s modernisation in the last section of this chapter. History in Turkey, due to the historical conditions of its modernisation as Westernisation, has failed to forge its hegemony and naturalisation. Actually, history has not been properly shut down and externalised, it is still happening. In other words, the past is never past and still alive in its effects. However, instead of leading to an open confrontation with or a process of mourning over what is lost, it gives rise to an internal truth that cannot be symbolised (but has significant impact on practices), primarily due to the imperatives of an external truth, that of Western modernity.19 While the BBC, as one of the most important institutions of Britain, could keep the archives as part of a history that exists at a safe distance from the present, specifically with regard to Turkey, the history of modernisation is based on a radical rupture and foreclosure of the past in Turkey, which transforms the past into living spectres in the present, as the oral archiving of the destruction of archives would imply.20 Based on this, I would say that the missing archives in Turkey do not simply mean that history is missing. On the contrary, it means that the ‘historical a priori,’ in Foucault’s terms (2002),21 or the very ground of the national history is suspect. Not only is national history constantly being challenged by narratives of memory that exceed the limits of history and disrupt its logic, the archives in a broader sense (the law of what can be said) do not establish the ‘outside’ that in its otherness ‘delimits us’ (Foucault 2002: 147).22 On the contrary, modern Turkish history always refers back to some-

38

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

thing alien (Western modernity) as part of its development — something alien, yet the source of her/his own origin, which the subject desires to bring closer to internalise (as authentic) as well as destroy (as foreign). The consequent personalisation and destruction both undermine history as ‘outside.’ Then, one can argue that the routine destruction of archives in Turkey continuously posits, from within, the violence of the rupture and loss that Turkey had to experience in order to become a modern nation. Therefore, not only archives as documents subject to destruction are at stake, but the very destruction itself is symptomatic of a crisis of archives as historical a priori, in Foucault’s terms. The non-West has been labelled ‘backward,’ meaning not only belated but also non-civilised, and located at the lower stages of a universalised Western modernity exposed to a profound crisis in terms of its own history. Chakrabarty, in his criticism of Western historicism, refers to this phenomenon as the ‘waiting room of history’ for non-Westerners (2000). It is no coincidence that a Turkish historian called his book The Waiting Room of Civilisation, long before Chakrabarty used this phrase. Interestingly, the author of this book, Tar›k Zafer Tunaya, took the phrase from a much earlier source, from ‹zzet Fuat Pafla, an Ottoman statesman. ‹zzet Fuat Pafla’s words, also published in French in 1913, are striking: Those nations which dream are unhappy. Despite our institutions, schools and citizens living in the West, we very much remained as Asian dreamers. We are not only physically but also mentally lazy since we have not really ventured to learn why we are left so far from this good and beautiful civilisation. Until we are reformed we are going to stay in the waiting room of civilization (cited in Tunaya 1989). The ‘waiting room of history/civilisation’ denotes a yearning for recognition from an imagined authority. But it also confides a story of self-depreciation projected from the imagined Western gaze, which has deemed local experience, as such, unworthy of knowledge and register. While the so-called Western nations have constructed history as scientific and hegemonic narrative, which wards off competing memories, and thus employ history to legitimise their own power while marginalising others, non-Western nations lack a sense of history as a coherent and powerful narrative. The latter suffer from the semi-conscious knowledge that the official history is nothing but artifice. Not only are they doomed to stay in the ‘waiting room of history,’ in Chakrabarty’s words, but neither can they utilise history as a hegemonic form of modernity in their own contexts.

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

39

Turkey as the contested heir of the Ottoman past under the constant surveillance of the Western gaze suffers from a certain fear of history. History is a frozen realm in Turkey, no more than a rigid prose about a brief episode starting with the victories of the Turkish nation and ending with the death of the national leader, Mustafa Kemal. The history textbooks in schools are perfect examples of this. History is the empty formula which enacts the phantasmatic performance of the nation, in the sense that ‘we know that this is not the full story, but we should nevertheless perform it as if it were true.’ This constitutes the frame of Occidentalism as a performative discourse, which displays a devotion to a Western form of modernity on the surface, yet constantly refers to the imagined threatening Western gaze to produce the intimacy within,23 mostly to justify mystified power relations, such as the secrets of the state. The flexibility of the inner truth separated from the objectified externality provides the very ground for performing Occidentalism as a discourse of power. I would say that the destruction of archives is the most acute symptom of this split self and truth. Yet, destruction is also a form of appropriation of history. The narratives of memory about destroyed or missing archives circulate and establish a different register of truth, an intimate truth of loss, in dialogism with the official truth of progress on display for the West. I will refer to these two different registers of truth throughout the book to explore the dynamics of Occidentalism and political subjectivity. Accordingly, there appear two different pasts. One past is performed for the projected Western gaze and forges continuity between past and present, but only by denying both the legacy of the Ottoman past and the experiences of heterogeneous temporality in the present. This is the oppressive and timeless national history in Turkey. The other past is not monolithic, but composed of memory fragments within which the past and the present cannot be distinguished. This other past is suffused with multiplicity (not only plurality but also conflicts about the past in terms of religious, ethnic, regional, and personal terms), but it fails to construct a distinct representation of its own. It survives in intimacy as a supplement to the official national history, as the amusing stories of the destruction of archives have shown us. In concluding this section, I would like to emphasise that ‘modernity as form’ is only one aspect that addresses the movement of modernity in time and space. The other and equally significant aspect is the performativity that utilises the form to enact a particular culture and subjectivity, as I have briefly discussed in the introduction, referring to the specific example of the bridge between East and West. The performance of modernity both produces and displaces modernity as form in Turkey, as it attempts to bridge

40

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

the two registers of truth.24 It is discursive, but goes beyond discourse to include in its performance (non-symbolic and un-codified) reactions to the conditions of existence of the discourse (as the historical a priori); these reactions appear mostly in the form of gestures, subversions, and excesses. Therefore, absences should not mislead the researcher. The absence of the archives in Turkish radio broadcasting is indicative of a surplus with an abundance of symptoms and effects, a surplus which manifests itself as absence and which resists analysis in the Western framework of historical research. The surplus is the realm of the Other that has been denied a real subjectivity and historicity in the representations of Western modernity. In the following, I will discuss Occidentalism and political subjectivity more extensively. Occidentalism and Political Subjectivity If you are to be hung, better be hung with a Western rope. Turkish proverb

One can learn a lot from Orientalists when thinking about Occidentalism. Bernard Lewis, as a devoted Orientalist, has given one of the most realistic accounts of Turkey’s traumatic impasse between its newly crafted national identity and the so-called Western modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Lewis, the official campaign of Kemalists in the 1930s to write history anew, fabricating an authentic Turkish past, ‘a mixture of truth, half-truth and error’ (B. Lewis 2004: 426), cannot be merely derided as ‘the whim of an autocrat,’ namely Atatürk. Lewis’s interest in the emergence of modern Turkey was always supportive (B. Lewis 1968).25 According to him, ‘one of the reasons for the campaign was the need to provide some comfort for Turkish national self-respect, which had been sadly undermined during the last century or two. First, there was the demoralizing effect of a long period of almost uninterrupted defeat and withdrawal by the Imperial Ottoman forces. Then there was the inevitable reaction to Western prejudice. It is difficult not to sympathize with the frustration and discouragement of the Young Turk, eager for enlightenment; who applied himself to the study of Western languages, to find that in most of them his name is an insult’ (B. Lewis 2004: 427). We should note the frame of understanding here: how the ‘Turk,’ substituting the Ottoman past with a fictive nationalist history and aspiring to modernity despite the insult attached to its name by the West, is marked different, yet celebrated by an Orientalist. In this section, I will discuss the constitutive dynamics of Occidentalism

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

41

and political subjectivity in Turkey, not altogether independent from the tropes of Orientalism, as Said (1995) has described and criticised, and as exemplified in the above passage. I must once more emphasise that I utilise the concept of Occidentalism in a much more critical and broader perspective than meaning either loyal Westernism or spiteful anti-Westernism, as usually defined in current usage. Hence, Occidentalism, in my view, does not only denote civilisation voluntarily adopted from the West, or a mere hatred or revolt against it, as usually associated with the Middle East today. Occidentalism points to both discursive and non-discursive strategies and tactics that ‘Orientals’ employ in order to answer to the West. In the case of Turkey, Occidentalism has been a way of restoring the authenticity of the past lost due to modernisation in the form of the nation, while at the same time catching up with the time of modern history. Hence, Occidentalism as a performative discourse addresses both the desire for and denigration of what is essentialised and reified as the West. The re-codification and operationalisation of a notion of the West is also mobilised within power relations to demarcate, define and control Others within society. Although Orientalism and Occidentalism are dialogically shaped, one must attend to the unevenness in power relations and, consequently, the definition and representation of Self and Other, and the articulation of the discourses of history and modernity within them, as the missing archives have revealed. Yet, despite the apparent unevenness, there is a shared ‘superaddressee,’ which avails a certain dialogue between Orientalism and Occidentalism, as we have seen in Bernard Lewis’s sympathy for Turkey’s fabrication of a new past. Interestingly, the superadressee, used by Bakhtin in the sense of an imaginary listener ‘whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time’ (Bakhtin 1986: 126) is not modernity, but national identity and civilisation in this framework: while the representation of modernity is coined in a binary of modern/traditional and produced within an apparent hierarchy between the West and the non-West, it is the shared constitutive and justifying assumption that the nation is the most tolerable form of community in the civilised modern world.26 How nation and modernity are connected to each other is significant, if one is to reveal the intertwined histories of Orientalism and Occidentalism. It is common to associate the idea of modernity with incessant change; hence, modernity is temporal, fluid and universal, whereas national identity is signified as spatial, stable and particular. However, nation and modernity must be studied as congruous and synchronic historical constructs, and their hegemonic temporal and spatial definitions should be problematised in their

42

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

interconnection. Especially when considered in a non-Western context within which modernity could never be normalised, we can see that the representation of modernity is not just temporal but also spatial (that is, Western) and that its supposedly universal time is not homogeneous.27 On the other hand, the imagining of the nation is not only particular-spatial, but has a universal-temporal axis — an ‘unbound seriality,’ in Benedict Anderson’s terms (1998). Therefore, what makes modernity a universal vantage point, as for example assumed by Orientalism in knowing and understanding the Other, is the universalised temporal aspect of the nation — that is, how a particular culture becomes a nation. Bernard Lewis claims that the idea of the Turks as a nation was produced under Western influence, with the help of the ‘European science of Turcology’ (2004: 423),28 implying the artifice (as opposed to the ‘real thing’) of the Turkish nation — which rebounds in a range of discourses on Turkey, including some critical approaches I have discussed in the introductory chapter. The very notion of the nation, while presenting an axis of comparison, also introduces an indivisible organic difference, which assigns superiority to certain nations while designating others as inferior according to their capacity for modernity, tested by the criteria of civilisation. It seems that the unbound seriality of modern nation-making that Benedict Anderson favourably compares to constricting bound serialities of politics of ethnicity or religion somehow could not be successfully accomplished in several communities, usually in non-Western contexts. Hence, not all nations are equal; some, especially in the non-West, are different and inferior. I would argue that Occidentalism dialogically responds to this very difference in a similar, ambivalent manner. It attempts to destroy the undesired difference with the West in temporal terms, by catching up with modern civilisation, while maintaining the desired difference as authenticity in its national space. Furthermore, it is possible to argue that nation and modernity are not just necessary conditions of each other, but that national identity is also at the core of being modern — that is, a society becomes modern only by assuming a particular substance,29 by becoming a nation. I find this point crucial in discussing Occidentalism, since it is most often thought that, in non-Western contexts, national identity is used to curb and contain the extreme and unwanted effects of modernity, in other words, to ‘overcome modernity’ (Harootunian 2000). Nation and modernity are usually put in tension with each other, specifically to explain the ongoing forms of antiWesternism in the non-West.30 Attempts to overcome modernity define a specific time-space context, the realm of the national, by positing a culture

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

43

exempt from the uncertainty of historical changes, and by embracing ‘capitalism without its social effects and periodic crises,’ as discussed for example by Harootunian in the case of Japan, where modernity is regarded as a Western imperative (2000: xxi). But as Harootunian also suggests, this is not a particularly non-Western reaction.31 The zeal of the ruling classes, in particular, to overcome modernity has been historically constitutive of modernity, not only in non-Western contexts, but also in the so-called West.32 This is important for understanding that modernity is not an inevitable movement that naturally disseminates from the West to the rest, but how its universalised representation as civilisation is self-consciously produced in capitalist and colonialist Europe as a model, which I have discussed as Occidentalism of the West above. Consecutively, as Young argues, ‘the creation of the Orient ... signifies the West’s own dislocation from itself, something inside that is presented, narrativised, as being outside’ (Young 1990: 139). This would mean to repeat the obvious, but it is still necessary to emphasise that knowledge, for example, in Orientalism about the Orient, is not pure knowledge. Bernard Lewis, too, has not abstained from admitting that Orientalism is not disinterested knowledge. He has noted that, in the case of modern Turkey, ‘the mixture of prejudice, ignorance, and cynicism that disfigures most European writings about the Turks can have given him no very high opinion of the European ideal of disinterested historical enquiry and the search for truth’ (B. Lewis 2004: 427). Similarly, the knowledge of the West in Occidentalism is not neutral; it is not only instrumental and pragmatic, but also infused with affect when politically distinguishing the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ West in order to negotiate the authenticity of the nation and foreground nativism.33 How, then, are Orientalisms and Occidentalisms historically legitimated? I would like to assert once again that the shared and dialogical assumption of national identity as a fixed and authentic representation functions in both the West and the non-West to hide that knowledge of the Other is an impossible task, given that the Other is always a projection of the Self. But the supposed archaic and pre-modern essence of the modern nation easily endorses and celebrates the sacrifices of knowledge for the sake of producing affects, which resonate both in Orientalism and Occidentalism. Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism (1995) deserves attention here in pointing to the grid of power within which knowledge is produced. Yet, my analysis goes beyond the knowledge/power grid and takes fantasy, non-knowledge, and surplus as its basic tools for conceptualizing Occidentalism as a hegemonic performative discourse in Turkey and, consequently, as the condition

44

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

of the political subjectivity of the modern Turkish elite. My specific aim is to contextualise the ideals, the practices and the affects of the elite in imagining the nation, the people and themselves, and presenting these to others through the use of modern technology. Although I argue that modern technologies have played a critical role in the shaping of both national and modern imagination in Turkey, my analysis of political subjectivity is not technological determinist. Instead, I attempt to locate radio technology through its mediation of abstractions, such as desires and ideals, as well as the concrete placement and displacement of sounds within a social and historical universe in order to explicate the dynamics of Occidentalism. Radio broadcasting constructs a virtual visibility through the play of sounds. The constructed visibility claims to represent the existing reality, but in fact it is inviting the audience to imagine this reality. A new reality is constructed through radio broadcasting in which speaker and speech, musician and music, form and content are detached. This reality cannot be experienced as such, but can only be perceived with the help of the technological instrument. This very imagination is part of the performance and reception of modernity. But it would be misleading to think that these technologies, such as the gramophone and the radio, which displace and disembody sounds while reproducing them, as Weidman discusses in the case of India (2003), construct modernity as opposed to tradition. Instead, modern technologies are implemented to produce simultaneously the effects of modernity as change and tradition as unchanging essence. The mediated perception through radio technology offers new forms of identification and a new source of affect for both the speakers on the radio (who speak without hearing) and the listeners (who listen without speaking). In order to have a better sense of how the placement and displacement of sounds operate, let us briefly lend our ears to Sait Çelebi of Ankara Radio in 1939, who presented the live relay of the national ceremony in the Ankara stadium held in honour of ‹smet ‹nönü’s becoming the second president of Turkey, after Mustafa Kemal’s death: All eyes are fixed on the central box of the ceremonies. Everybody in the adjacent tribunes is slowly standing up ... everybody is looking forward. There is not a single sound. You don’t hear anything, do you? But do you know how many people are there in this stadium, the hippodrome and in the passage of military review? You guess. Almost all the population of Ankara is here at the moment. Some people say it is 100,000, others say 129,000. I cannot give a definite number. But it

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

45

is indeed packed. See those soldiers, how magnificent they are in the way they look up to the national leader.34 The live relay through its virtual visibility presents a stage for imagining the national leader, the soldiers and the people, and offers a position to share the national emotions by placing oneself in that mass (nation), whatever one’s actual location and position might be at that moment. The position opened in this performance invites the listener to take part; also, when considered from the viewpoint of the producer, the way he testifies to this important event in national history gives him a significant position for bridging the centre (Ankara) and the periphery (the people), the modern (the live relay) and the traditional (awe for the military and the national leader). Occidentalism, then, is not simply a point of view. It is an enabling discourse of power in the non-West 35 — a discourse in the Foucauldian sense, which consists of statements, practices and technologies and delimits what one may say. Beyond that, it also evokes a citational field of memory and intimacy derived from the foreclosed history and produces a fantasy of authenticity and sovereignty as nationalism, all through the performance of Western forms of modernity. In simpler terms, Occidentalism is the generation of an acceptable format for speech and action in the complex social terrain in which pragmatic interests, desire and fear, and insecurity and the will to power exist side by side. Performativity cuts through the dichotomous boundaries of technology and culture, form and content, and enables a boundary management, as in the continuous performing of the bridge identity. We will see furthermore that Occidentalism provides a guide, not only for politics in a narrow sense, but also for a wide range of issues from childcare to national music, from family relations to ethnic and religious identities, in the performance of the elite through radio broadcasting. Foucault’s perspective, which is critical of Western humanism and which unsettles its hegemonic concepts (such as reason, history, and knowledge) has primarily informed my analysis. After all, it was Foucault’s theoretical perspective on power and knowledge that provided the tools for going beyond the naturalised categories of East and West in Said’s illuminating work on Orientalism (1995). ‘Discourse’ is obviously one such useful tool. However, although I employ the term ‘discourse,’ I find Foucault’s conception of it limiting for the interpretation of the emerging problems in my research. Let me briefly elaborate on what exactly I regard as limiting. Following Foucault, I treat radio broadcasting as a site of discursive practices linked to a whole range of complex modifications outside of its domain, such as social relationships and political institutions, but also to inside fac-

46

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

tors, such as its techniques for determining its object, the adjustment and refinement of its concepts, and its accumulation of facts (Foucault 1977: 200). This justifies my treatment of the specificity of the discourse that has informed radio broadcasting in Turkey, not as a less perfect form of the Western model,36 but as a distinct practice which has its boundaries, its rules of formation, and its conditions of existence (Foucault 1991a: 62). Such a perspective guides my comparative analysis of the BBC Turkish Section and Turkish Radio broadcasting. Foucault has dealt with the limits and the forms of what can be said and argued against the excavation of implicit meanings; hence, Foucault’s interest in analysing discourses from the viewpoint of forms of inscription and circulation of knowledge.37 However, Foucault’s emphasis on the exteriority of discourses — that is, their manifest appearance — cannot attend to what survives within and beyond the discourse as repressed or foreclosed, and as such the non-representable.38 His emphasis lies on the scientifically demonstrable techniques of power or government. In this context, the problem of reason is treated in a universe within which the meticulous attempt to register the social and a will to truth exist as the dominant mode of power. The ‘antagonisms of strategies,’39 which he has studied within this universe, only make the already inscribed forms of rationality visible.40 Therefore, a Foucauldian perspective does not reflect on the historical conditions of the articulation of reason as part of Western history,41 in which Western power over the non-West has been the structuring principle for the representation of modernity/coloniality (Mignolo 2000). Although Foucault has made it clear that ‘we have to refer to much more remote processes if we want to understand how we have been trapped in our history’ (1982: 210),42 his historical imagination does not go as far as the non-West.43 Keeping in mind C. L. R James’s warning that post-colonial critics must remain alert to ‘domains of social practice that are not governed by textual/communicative rules’ (Henry and Buhle 1992:140), I argue that the discourse on the modern nation in Turkey would simply not be intelligible in terms of the forms and limits of the sayable. What was regarded to be ‘not sayable’ and remained unrepresented, but still continued to shape discursive practices, should be addressed too. The historical and formal imperative of Western modernity, or synonymously civilisation, overdetermines the tension between the sayable and the non-sayable and, consequently, between the inscription of knowledge and the subversion of it. How to make sense of those practices that do not seem to fit into a particular logic (what is manifest as the logic)? Or, to put it in more general terms, how to do we understand the temporal and spatial zones of modernity that have not been illumi-

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

47

nated by the Enlightenment framework, which escapes its own reason, yet historically inheres in its structuration by its repression or displacement?44 That dark zone where reason meets its counterpart, where discourses are in a dynamic link with non-discursive practices of subversion, transgression or destruction.45 Thus, going through Foucault, I try to reach much more remote processes that may lie beyond modern discourses and modern political technologies, in order to analyse the historicity of these statements, practices, and symptoms in the realm of the Other as the blind spot of most Western social theories. At this point, I want to turn to psychoanalysis to bring in certain concepts to help think about these blind spots. Psychoanalysis unsettles Western notions of self-identical selfhood. The unconscious desire, according to Freud, splits the human subject and makes it non-identical with itself. Freud’s theory is a ‘challenge to Western thought on power of reason and rationality, of reflective and conscious control over the self’ (Elliott 1992: 17). Given that the Western notion of the self is contested by psychoanalysis, it is not mere coincidence or just an intellectual preference that post-colonial criticism, dating back to Fanon, has made use of psychoanalytical concepts to address the splits in the colonised subject, as structured by the conditions of colonialism.46 But in these accounts, the emphasis shifts from personal experience to social context. For Fanon, for example, the ‘inferiority complex’ that the ‘Negro’ experienced in colonised Algeria had nothing to do with family dynamics or the Oedipus complex, but with the ‘epidermalization’ of social inferiority (Kruks 1996). It is also significant that Fanon contrasted the appeal to reason in the Western context to the temptation of the colonised to escape reason.47 The psychic economy that produced pathologies in this context was generated by the conflict between the ‘lived experience of the black,’ and the linguistic imposition of the ‘education to whiteness’ (Stevens 1996: 206). While Freudian analysis has been confined to the operations of the individual psyche despite its dynamics that relates it to the Other, post-colonial critics have offered mediating concepts (such as ambivalence, resentment, and mimicry) to account for the interconnections between individual experiences and historical processes.48 Similarly, I employ certain psychoanalytical concepts that mediate the historical context of becoming a non-Western modern nation and the political subjectivity in Turkey. Yet, one cannot simply replicate post-colonial criticism in the Turkish context, since Turkey does not neatly fit into the colonialist or post-colonialist scheme of the coloniser and the colonised, due to its peculiar history.49 Not only has there been less overt confrontation with Western powers, but also the sovereignty of the modernising subject

48

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

has been assumed throughout Turkish history. Both negation and appropriation of history take different forms in this particular context. Therefore, I find the concept of fantasy especially meaningful to account for the ambiguity of — that is, both the positivity (sovereignty) of and the void (loss) within — Occidentalism as a discourse. In its psychoanalytical uses, for example for Freud, fantasy (or phantasy) refers to the imaginary fulfilment of frustrated wishes.50 I would also like to keep a distinction between this conception of ph/fantasy and mere daydreaming. However, I prefer to employ the term fantasy in a broader sense, enveloped in social dynamics rather than the individual psyche. Zizek has pointed to social fantasy as a focal concept that replaces language in his analysis when arguing against the structural readings of Lacan. The emphasis made by Zizek, in this context, regards the position of the subject, not as a pre-determined position in a discourse, but as an empty space, a void that has to be filled by identification. Thus, Zizek ascribes fantasy an important role as a link between individual psychic life and the social context. His claim is that ‘fantasy is basically a scenario filling out the empty space of a fundamental impossibility, a screen masking a void’ ( Zizek, 1989: 125). In this context, social fantasy can address how ambivalences towards Western modernity are sustained in modern Turkish nationalism, in the form of an imagined sovereignty that creates its own Others. In fact, fantasy does not provide a useful explanation of the character of its ‘object,’ but sheds light upon its producers and adherents, as Mladen Dolar would say: ‘It projects unto the screen of this distant Other our own impasses and practices in dealing with power, and stages them’ (Dolar 1998: xiv). Hence, it addresses the dynamics of political subjectivity. The way in which ‘us’ and ‘them’ figure in early Turkish nationalism and in radio programmes of the period are indeed ambivalent towards the West: ‘The West that has denied and ruined our history’ coexists with ‘the West idealised as the civilisation.’ The ambivalence is productive of a social fantasy of Turkish national identity, which combines the elements of both Western civilisation and authentic Turkish culture. However, despite the rigid and despotic attempts of the Turkish elite to define and fix the Turkish national self embedded in a unique modern and national culture, the limits of the fantasy can be observed in what is articulated as pathologies of Turkish-ness. These pathologies become distinctively visible in the historical appropriation of Western psychology discourse in Turkey. The Turkish elite was particularly interested in psychology, and in the 1940s especially in Freud’s psychoanalysis. But this concern with psychoanalysis derived from an interest in interpreting away, as it were, the splits of the national self, rather than

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

49

coming to terms with what Freud’s analysis of the self may reveal. It dwelled on psychological explanations of ‘social vice,’ which could be eradicated by further commitment to Kemalist principles. In being figured and employed in this way, a certain version of psychoanalysis helped endorse the political regime, instead of leading to a radical analysis. It is worthwhile to look at a significant example of such an adaptation of Freud’s theory and the objects of analysis that are indicated within it. In a very interesting series of articles in a leading journal of the period, Yeni Adam, entitled ‘Social Neurosis in Turkey,’51 ‹zeddin fiadan compared Turkish society to a sick individual, referring to Freud. ‘It is now apparent,’ he observed, ‘that a social neurosis reigns in Turkey. It is not a big surprise that a social community, which has been drifting on war and poverty for so many years, which has only been treated by hostility by all nations — both Islamic and Christian — gets sick, similar to an individual who has been subject to traumas. Just as there is a need to cure an individual by diagnosing and eradicating the reasons that cause the illness, when social communities get ill, one has to find the reasons and diagnose the pathology.’52 Although this article itself is not exempt from an internalised Western judgment that had labelled the Ottoman State as a ‘sick man,’ it dwells on the problem of Westernisation and its effects on Turkish society. fiadan’s concern was to both diagnose the problem and develop forms of treatment. Interestingly, the article targeted the illness as manifested within the elite and classified the members of the elite according to the different categories of neurosis that fiadan defined. The categories ranged from defeatism to infantilism, from narcissism to revoltism. The categories are highly charged in terms of their political connotations in the context of the nationalist discourse and can be interpreted as functional in enacting the norm against those who do not conform. This can be regarded as the positivity of the discourse. However, what underlined the analysis of the political symptoms of social neurosis was an inferiority complex which implies a deep void: ‘A feeling of inferiority has been corroding us for a hundred and fifty years. To see ourselves inferior, and to always lament that the West, or in better words, the Christian world is superior to us, is one of our most pathetic habits.’53 The publishers of the journal inserted a footnote to the article, arguing that history as a discipline was also afflicted with a feeling of inferiority in Turkey. According to the publishers, instead of doing objective historical research, Turkish historians had a tendency to take statements against Turkey as if they were absolute facts, due to their feelings of inferiority. It may well be argued that fiadan also suffered from a feeling of inferiority in making the diagnosis. Although he pointed to hostility against the Turks

50

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

as the major reason of inferiority, instead of directly opposing the source of hostility, he internalised the aggression by transforming it into a pathology of Turkish-ness. fiadan’s ambivalent attitude to the West is best illustrated in his final remarks about the futility of this feeling of inferiority under contemporary circumstances, as Turkey has now taken its place among modern nations; what remains therefore could only be the ‘fear of fear.’ The analysis, contradictorily, both diagnoses and denies the problem at the same time. In other words, it wishes it away. What this rather non-reflexive and ideological interpretation of Freudian analysis crucially brings to view is how the Turkish elite has seen the specificity of Turkey through the imagined Western gaze and attempted to mask the split between the narrative of the civilised self and social reality, by way of identifying both with the West and the nation. fiadan and his contemporaries produced and adopted the social fantasy of Turkish-ness for impossibly grounding Turkey’s position as both national and modern. They referred not to history but to social fantasy in order to posit that Turkey was a now a Western nation, but paradoxically the social fantasy was constructed by utilising the pathological differences with the West and revealed the limits of the claim of sameness. The split between the position of the elite who aspired to sameness with the West and the neurosis that inevitably reigned in society recurs in almost every account of nationalism; it becomes more apparent in the domain of the discursive practices pertaining to radio broadcasting, since radio by its technological nature is more fragmentary, when compared, for example, to ideologically crafted, monolithic official and political narratives. The voice of the nation that is disseminated by radio is already the product of a split, in the sense that it is loosely attached to the political subject. Radio technology produces a voice ‘without bearer, which cannot be attributed to any subject and thus hovers in some indefinite interspace’ (Zizek 1991: 126). Interestingly, the voice of the nation produced in that very interspace and disseminated by radio broadcasting has been problematised in terms of whether it could be the ‘proper’ language of the new nation; this led to frustrations and anxieties, as we will see in the following chapter. Therefore, the psychoanalytically informed concept of social fantasy that addresses the unbridgeable gap between the subject and the object is highly relevant for theorising the splits of the national self in its various aspects as deployed by radio broadcasting. The historical construction of the subject by the denial and foreclosure of history, the reduction of the heterogeneity of the population to ‘the people’ (never free of pathologies), and consequently the ambivalent attitude towards the West emerge as meaningful objects of analysis in this framework. Zizek dwells on the difference between the subject of the signifier in lan-

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

51

guage and the objects of social fantasy it thrives to incorporate into its virtual identity. He points both to the process of subjectivisation, and to the object-cause of desire in this context. The significance of this conceptualisation bears upon two points I wish to take in my analysis: (1) the process of identification of the elite with the West and the objects of desire that are incorporated in a social fantasy; and (2) the elements that escape the discursive network, that ‘fall out’ of it, that are produced as its ‘excrement’ or ‘remainder’ (Zizek 1991: 131). In the following, I will employ two other concepts of Zizek to interpret the symptoms (the coded messages, in Zizek’s terms) of these dynamics: ‘the virtual viewpoint of the Ego-ideal,’ and ‘nonknowledge’.54 According to Zizek, the identification process involves a double reflection. If the first reflection belongs to the imaginary mirror-relationship that Lacan has elucidated, which makes possible for the subject both identity and its misrecognition, the second reflection is experienced in the symbolic realm in connection with the Ego-ideal. The self produced by the double reflection can be posited as ‘I am what I think how the others (who are symbolically significant informed by the hegemonic discourse of signifiers or the “master-signifier”) see me.’ Then, both the subjective identity and the viewpoint of the other are virtual. Because the subject can never bridge the gap between the actual and the virtual, it is forever trapped in the impossibility of achieving a self-identical identity. The self is both displaced and constituted by the non-knowledge that arises from the virtual circuit of the self’s relation to the other. Non-knowledge is a functional non-discursive entity in Zizek’s conceptual frame. It does not necessarily indicate the implicit or unconscious meaning that can be revealed by excavation. According to Zizek, ‘the unconscious must instead be conceived as a positive entity that retains its consistency on the basis of a certain non-knowledge’ (1992: 44). In the same manner, for ‘reality to exist, something must be left unspoken’ (45). In other terms, the ‘ontological consistency’ of reality ‘implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants — if we come to “know too much,” to pierce the function of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself’ (Zizek 1989: 21). Zizek, in this way, incorporates non-knowledge into the process of identification, whereby subjects assume a certain identity in a complex reality sutured by social fantasy, which narrates itself as having a specific origin and laws of development. If we take these arguments to explicate the dynamics of Occidentalism, we could say that the West has been constituted as the virtual viewpoint of the Ego-ideal for the national elite in Turkey. Thus, Turkish-ness means how we think that the West sees us. The inferiority complex that fiadan

52

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

mentioned in his article clearly reflects the virtual viewpoint of the West as the Ego-ideal. Consequently, the virtual viewpoint constructs Turkish identity. As fiadan has said: ‘For centuries there have been proverbs, such as “if you are to be hung, better be hung with a Western rope,” or “when a Turk is given a lordship he first kills his father,” that indicate the superiority of the Western over the Turk and are all expressions of an inferiority complex, which shows that the inferiority complex does not only afflict the educated elite but has been disseminated throughout society.’55 But what is unnecessary and irrational for fiadan — that is, seeing yourself through the eyes of the other — corresponds exactly to what Zizek posits as the (impossible) ground of subjectivity. Furthermore, we have seen that for Zizek nonknowledge is functional in the process of identification. Similarly, what the projected Western gaze actually sees could have never been fixed and known in Turkish history, and this non-knowledge provided a productive space not only for fiadan, who wrote directly on the subject, but also for other intellectuals, journalists and politicians who incessantly wrote and talked about what Westernisation and modernisation could possibly mean. Turkish identity in this context persists as a question that needs to be defined and redefined, and which today has come to take on new variations in the ongoing negotiations with the European Union.56 But at this point, I would like to give my argument a new twist and claim that it is not merely non-knowledge, but instead ‘knowing too much yet pretending not to know this’ which defines Occidentalist political subjectivity in its specificity. This should be considered together with my previous argument of the two different registers of truth in Turkey. Those practices that seem — from the virtual viewpoint of the Western gaze — not logical and suitable to be included in the domain of the sayable — in other words, the practices performed at the limits of the discourse (as in the case of the missing archives) — pierce reality. If reality could only be sutured by non-knowledge, and only in that way symbolically signified, then the excesses that could not be signified in terms of the national history and discourse constantly challenge the reality of what is signified as reality. The identity could never be fixed and furthermore never stabilised, leading to an obsessive search for identity. Still, the excesses that undermine the construction of a naturalised reality are not altogether non-functional; they construct another truth at the margins of the signified, as if it exists as the reality. The excesses not inscribed into a field of rationality, thus, which seem accidental and contingent, in fact provide the conditions of possibility for sustaining the reality on display; they open a space for maneuvre so that the empty form of the signified reality does not collapse. The space of maneuvre or the domain of

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

53

internal truth nourishes the affects of nationalism, for example, by simultaneously implying the phoniness of a Westernised identity; it bears both the resentment against the loss caused by Westernisation, and the enjoyment of bypassing or disrupting its imported ideals in practice. Therefore, the internal truth not only evokes an inferiority complex, but also a space for relating to the non-symbolised heterogeneous temporalities within the specific locality, and for communication, albeit with different rules at that level. I contend that the enjoyment accompanying the narration of destroyed archives or other ‘failures’ in radio broadcasting are such examples that produce a register of what Turks actually are, despite so-called Westernisation. Therefore, Occidentalism, by utilising both the formally registered and displayed knowledge and the unregistered experiences, and by evoking two different truths — one external and transcendental, the other intimate and immediate — reproduces itself as a performative discourse. While constructing the virtual identity of the subject based on non-knowledge, Occidentalism simultaneously implies that the empty place of the subject is actually half-full with what ‘we know but pretend not to know.’ The native differences are played out in this context always in reference to Westernised forms. I have tried to outline and discuss the primary features of Occidentalism and political subjectivity in this section, departing from Foucault’s notion of discourse and moving on to several of Zizek’s concepts. In fact, just as Foucault did not attend to historical conditions of non-Western modernity, Zizek, too remains indifferent to specific historical formations, as long as his theoretical framework emphasises the functional aspects of the virtual viewpoint of the Ego-ideal and non-knowledge in identification. Although Zizek dismantles the supposed fit between the subject and culture and paves the way for a critical analysis, his analysis of social fantasy turns out to be more structural than historical, focusing on the necessity of the ‘lack of fit.’ According to him, the failure is functional for the maintenance of a social reality, and non-knowledge is what makes the discourse of truth possible. In this framework, the specific historical configurations of power in which the discourse of truth as well as its remainder emerge are left unattended. The Occidentalist fantasy, which comprises a series of representations giving consistent (or inconsistent) meanings to diverse practices, like all fantasies is based on psychoanalytical dynamics of projection and introjection; nevertheless, these dynamics also constitute and are informed by concrete and contested historical field of events, practices and discourses. Therefore, we need to turn to particular historical moments to explicate the processes of projection and introjection, and the dialogical meanings of the emerging orders of truth.

54

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Occidentalism and History The hegemonic historical narrative in Turkey takes the National Struggle against the invading European forces — the British, Italian, French, and Greek — in the 1920s as the first embodiment of the new Turkish nation. The victory in 1923 against the imperialist designs of the West, which aimed to partition the Ottoman Empire, has been a founding moment for imagining the nation as independent (from both the Ottoman past and Western forces) and sovereign. Although the narrative consolidation of the nation can be traced in its different phases throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, the narrative nevertheless bears some inherent contradictions, such as the ambivalent attitude towards the West. It is worthwhile to turn to accounts of experiences in memoirs to understand the historical and social dimensions of this ambivalence, which the official narrative masks under the rhetoric of the nation. Halide Edip Ad›var’s memoir of the National Struggle in the early 1920s is especially interesting in that respect. Halide Edip — who was a prolific nationalist writer and intellectual of the period, but also a militant woman fighter in the National Struggle — has given a vivid account of her encounters with several peasants in Anatolia at that time. She had been assigned the duty to visit different villages and report the atrocities inflicted by the Greeks to the Turkish population. Her conversation with an old peasant woman is highly significant in revealing the local meanings of the West. The peasant woman complains to Halide Edip that her efforts to write reports were actually in vain: ‘Why do you write? What could writing mean for a people who has been slaughtered?’ She continues: ‘I have asked for pity from the Greeks ... They told us that they have been sent by Avrope (Europe, in Turkish Avrupa). So, my girl, please tell that man called Avrope to leave us alone, we did not do anything bad to him, tell him not disturb us’ (Ad›var 1994: 201). The old peasant woman’s painful words about Europe give a sense of what the West or Europe could mean for the people of Anatolia during the imperialist invasion. It is obvious that these comments represent Europe as a threatening force that aimed to destroy the traditional order of things, that was involved in conspiracies to destroy the lives of the local people, and that was embodied in the figure of a man.57 But for Halide Edip herself, as a writer, Europe had always been an abstract concept, ambivalent in many aspects. While actually fighting the Western forces, Halide Edip and other Turkish intellectuals discussed and wrote on the possibilities of Westernisation. There was a wide gap between how the intellectuals and the local populations interpreted the West. Yakup Kadri Karaosmano¤lu, who

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

55

also wrote about the war years in Anatolia, has said: ‘The difference between a person educated in Istanbul and an Anatolian peasant is greater than an English Londoner and an Indian from the Punjab (1983: 53). According to Yakup Kadri, the alien existence of the intellectuals, who considered themselves an integral part of the Western world, became clearly evident when they went to Anatolia during the National Struggle. The intellectuals felt that, ‘as they went deeper into the country which they call their own, alienation from their origins grew bigger’ (Karaosmano¤lu 1983: 53). Should the National Struggle end with victory, added Yakup Kadri, then the intellectuals had ‘to make the nation’ by bridging this gap.58 The Turkish national identity propagated as the official identity of the new Turkish State after 1923 had to assume many dimensions that were in fact absent: the homogeneity of the national population, the existence of common origins, and a common will to the future development of the national state. As a consequence, national identity was erected on the basis of displacement, denial, and projection/introjection — namely, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey,59 the denial of the Ottoman past and significant events such as the the Armenian catastrophe, the violent crushing of Kurdish uprisings, the Turkification of religious and ethnic minorities on the basis of privileging Sunni Islam together with the repression of the Islamic religion as an organising element of culture in many localities, and consequently a complex dynamic of identification with the abstract notion of the people and the West. In this vein, the main axis of the Occidentalist fantasy in Turkey has been to diagnose the ‘lack’ in the people, as defined by both nationalist and modern discourses, and to produce the desire to fill this lack with civilised content. The desire was shaped by both projection and introjection. One the one hand, the elite who embraced the duty to make the nation projected pathologies, as reflected from the viewpoint of the imagined Western gaze, to the people who needed to be civilised; and on the other hand, they introjected ‘authentic’ elements assumed to be embodied in the people (such as the uncontaminated traditions of the Anatolian peasantry, especially the women) as the essence of the nation. The lack in the people had to be filled by means of Western technologies, but the same process involved a rigid regulation of some undesired aspects of Western-ness, such as ‘excessive Westernism’60 — that is, liberalism, immorality, and dangerous class and ethnic conflicts ascribed to the West. The antidote for these dangerous and unwanted aspects had to be found in the pure, homogeneous and essential Turkish culture, namely the idealised people. Therefore, the elite, while differentiating themselves from the people by identifying with the West,

56

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

reciprocally differentiated themselves from the West, by identifying with the people — hence, they engaged in continuous boundary management. It is important to note here that the lack that is posited in different forms and at different levels within the complex dynamics of projection and introjection was in fact shaped through a dialogic relationship with the lack projected onto Turkey, starting with the demise of the Ottoman Empire, by those geographical-political forces who labelled themselves as the West. The endeavour of making the nation in Turkey was inevitably bound with the dialogical operations of Orientalism and Occidentalism.61 This once again brings us to the constructs of the East and the West. The issue of Westernisation with regard to the historical and political opposition of the East and the West centrally figures in discourses on Turkey. Turkish modernisers often also use the phrase of ‘becoming contemporary’ as a synonym of Westernisation; this interestingly reveals the temporal inequality (vis-à-vis the model) built into Turkish modernity. However, instead of defining Westernisation as a historical fact, I choose to address it as a heterogeneous historical process interwoven with power, inequality and desire, and ideological labelling. The historical genealogy of Westernisation and its associations with Christianity not only in Turkey, but also in the West is yet to be traced; I will not attempt to do this here. What I would like to do instead is to focus on several historical moments in order to grasp more firmly the dialogical positioning of the West in the political subjectivity of the national elite. In other words, rather than reconstructing the history of Westernisation, hence reproducing the binary of East and West, I will point to several historical conditions of this binary and its impact on Turkish national modernisers. As I have noted above, one needs to take account of imperialist power practices when attending to these historical moments. I agree with Peyami Safa, who was a nationalist keen to bridge East and West, when he noted that ‘we have not voluntarily imitated the West; we were brought under its dominance by being exposed to its attacks and invasion’ (1990: 43). However, I find it equally important not to adopt the one-sided anti-imperialist position which identifies with the victim. The subject position of the ‘we,’ in Peyami Safa’s comments, is at the same time the position of the sovereign who enacts the trope of the West, simultaneously as enemy and desired modernisation, to perform power. At this point, I suggest we turn to the architect, as it were, of Turkish nationalism, the sociologist Ziya Gökalp, in order to have a closer look at the constitutive binary of East and West. Ziya Gökalp wrote his essays and books at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Ottoman Empire was undergoing Westernisation and

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

57

Westernised ideas and practices were rapidly proliferating. This historical period witnessed the establishment of schools and faculties teaching Western positive sciences; the circulation of Western books, newspapers, and specialised journals for women; and a new judiciary based on Western codes. At the same time, Western technologies were at work for reorganising space and social life: a postal service was established, streets were named and houses numbered; roads and railways were built; telegraph services connected the peripheral areas to the centre; and the telephone was introduced for communication. These Western technologies to a certain extent had a unifying impact in that they evoked the ‘social’ as an emerging category. We need to locate Gökalp’s work, which was informed by Western ideas and especially sociology in this context. Gökalp addressed Westernisation as a sociological question by taking the society as a whole entity and connecting it with the world, civilisation and culture. His sociological imagination claimed to go beyond ‘idiosyncratic Westernisms’ in the Ottoman Empire, supplanting them ‘by a critical appreciation of the West’ (Parla 1985: 22). Gökalp’s conceptual frame — which was to a great extent embraced by his heirs, the national elite of the Turkish Republic — consisted of a trinity of civilisation, culture and Islam. In this formulation, the concept of civilisation denoted the sciences and techniques of the West, yet in no way was it reducible to Western culture. Culture was to be found in what comprised Turkish-ness. Islam had a function in the nourishment of the national soul. The conceptual framework gains a deeper meaning if understood within the transformations cited above. Especially the definition of culture as being the ‘complex rules of language, politics, religion, morality, aesthetics, law and economy which exist on an unconscious level in the life of the nation’ (1917a: 166) is significant in this respect. Culture appears in this context as an entity independent of people and their deliberate intentions, an entity which enables imagining the nation as such. On the other hand, civilisation as science and techniques were externalised and instrumentalised, hence positing that society could be governed by universally objective knowledge and techniques. We can read this in the light of Foucault’s notion of govermentality, in which society was conceived as a totality that can be governed by political technologies based on scientific knowledge. The role of Islam that was relegated to the private realm to nourish the national soul shows that religion was no longer taken as the basis of politics, constituting an important step towards secularisation.62 Therefore, in Gökalp’s conceptual framework we see the delimitations of a new field of politics and the social — indeed, a modern conception, although not without problems. Gökalp makes subtle and ‘scientific’ distinctions between Westernism

58

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

and Turkish-ness.63 Interestingly, Turkish-ness is posited as an absence that could only be filled with a series of projections. His conceptualisation first depicts the denial of Turkish-ness in the Ottoman Empire. According to him, Turks were excluded from real loci of power; they could not establish themselves as an economic class. They were mostly peasants who were ridiculed by the religious and secular elites.64 However, as ‘sociology has shown, genius is hidden in the people,’ and Turkish-ness can be awakened by nationalism. Nationalism was an ideal that would raise the conscience of Turkish people from a subconscious to the conscious level. The origins supposedly lay in a previous golden age: Turkish life in Central Asia, long ago. Therefore, the real Turkish cultural traits were not those of Oriental origin — such as polygamy, the seclusion of women and their low status, fatalism, and ascetism. For example, the ‘sickly Oriental music’ was imposed upon the Islamised Turks through the infiltrations of the Near East (Gökalp 1981: 29). Thus, Gökalp denied the present situation of Islamic culture in the Ottoman Empire and projected Turkish nationalism, which seemed to be absent but was in fact present, as an ideal unto the people.65 Gökalp invented a new Turkish-ness through the prism of an imagined past, but by employing the tools of sociology, and through the projection of the imagined Western gaze. On the other hand, reducing the West to sciences and techniques enables his framework to have a necessary distance to the West (as well as to the ‘Oriental’) on a cultural basis. The new synthesis in Turkey, in his words, would show that ‘the foundations of European civilization are worn, sick, and rotten, that they are destined to fall and disintegrate’ (Gökalp 1981: 60). In opposition, ‘the Turkish intelligence is not worn out, its sentiments are not effeminate, its will is not weakened’ (Ibid). Ziya Gökalp’s sociology provides a ‘scientific’ ground for Occidentalism, albeit not a very sound one. In order to assess the fragility of the proposed synthesis, let us revisit his definitions of civilisation and culture in a different formulation: ‘Civilisation is what is made by method and comprised of concepts and techniques that pass from one culture to another by way of mimesis. Culture, on the other hand, are the emotions that can neither be made by method nor taken from other cultures by mimesis’ (1994: 28).66 The distinction is also one between free will and immanence. If culture as the immanent potential is there to be discovered, then it is timeless and nonhistorical. But the will inherent in the concept of civilisation is tied to an imported concept and a method; and only these can foster change and make history. The formula of culture and civilisation, although interestingly sophisticated, is nevertheless highly abstract; furthermore, it clearly reveals a subject torn between two worlds. It seems less of a practical synthesis that

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

59

could aid government than a phantasmatic resolution of splits and conflicts in the very process of the Western colonisation of the Ottoman Empire. According to the Turkish philisopher and sociologist Hilmi Ziya Ülken, Gökalp’s was in fact not a synthesis but a hesitation between two worlds (Islam and the West).67 As a subject of the declining Ottoman Empire, Gökalp oscillitated between the still lingering offensive ideas of Ottoman imperialism (such as the idea of Turan, claiming Central Asia as Turkish) and defensive nationalistic Turkism. Gökalp was far from being realistic and fell prey to conceptualism with his abstract formulas. How could this abstract formula lead the national elite, who had the practical and difficult task of making the nation? Furthermore, the national elite had already undergone a war in which the West did not only signify science and techniques, but also fierce strategies of war and occupation. The new elite had to face the West as a real power, while they assumed the role of founding and consolidating the new state and created a national identity and culture. They had to be much more realistic. The imagery of Western civilisation that appears, for example, in Mustafa Kemal’s speeches in the early 1920s is striking for its defensive pragmatism. I quote one of them at length here to give a full sense of the rich imagery: We lived through pain because we did not understand the conditions of the world. Our thinking and our mentality will have to be civilized. And we will be proud of this civilization. Take a look at the entire Turkish and Islamic world. Because they failed to adapt to the conditions and rise, they found themselves in such a catastrophe and suffering. We cannot afford to hesitate any more. We have to move forward ... Civilization is such a fire that it burns and destroys those who ignore it ... It is futile to try to resist the thunderous advance of civilization, for it has no pity on those who are ignorant or rebellious. The sublime force of civilization pierces mountains, crosses the skies, enlightens and explores everything from the smallest particle of dust to stars ... When faced with this, those nations who try to follow the superstitions of the Middle Ages are condemned to be destroyed or at least to become enslaved and debased ... (cited by Kasaba 1997: 26, emphasis added). Civilisation in Mustafa Kemal’s words stands out as an aggressive force that is threatening, destructive and irresistible. Reflat Kasaba points to the supernatural, mythical character of civilisation depicted in these words (1997: 26). Another striking theme is, of course, the emphasis on speed: ‘We have to move forward’ or else ‘we’ will be destroyed. Progress is not only deified,

60

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

but its violence is also revealed. The impact of the West, therefore, was more than a mere importation of concepts and techniques for the national elite. It was a threat that they had to acknowledge and adapt to with high speed for the sake of survival. This set the ground for the fast process of modernisation after the foundation of the Turkish Republic. The new national government had to deal with a new temporality of progress (to which Turkey was already late); a new space delimited by the boundaries negotiated and accepted by the Lausanne Treaty of 1924; and the notion of modernity that had to be not only utilised for ordering the new time and space in the form of the nation, but also displayed for the Western gaze. As these would be the new criteria for the new regime, the national elite could not ‘afford to hesitate any more.’ Whether Kemalist reforms were in continuity with earlier attempts at Westernisation is a highly debated issue.68 I agree with fierif Mardin who emphasises that ‘sensitivity to the dimension of time’ places the reforms of the national elite ‘in a different category from the reformism of early Tanzimat’ (1981: 200).69 Similarly, the question as to whether the Kemalist restructuring of the political and social realms was reformist or revolutionary has attracted various interpretations.70 The ambiguous word ink›lâp, which had connotations of both reform and revolution, was functional in fostering a radical image for attempted changes, but at the same time allowing a space for ongoing negotiations with different interest groups. Islam was among the most debated subjects concerning diversity and, still ongoing, negotiation. Starting from the abolition of the authority of the sultan-caliph in 1922 and extending to the reorganisation of Islamic codes and practices in everyday life, the negotiations over the role of Islam in the new regime are yet to be settled in Turkish history. The ambiguity over the meaning of Islam in Turkey necessitates further elaboration, which is beyond the scope of this book; yet, one small example will suffice to show that the ambiguity is not contingent but constitutive. Otherwise, how could the poem of the pious Islamic poet Mehmet Akif become the Turkish national anthem?71 The national anthem describes civilisation as a ‘monster that has one tooth left.’72 Yet, Turkish modernisers who had the ambitions to ‘catch’ the ‘thunderous advance’ of civilisation nevertheless embraced the anthem. Gökalp’s distinction between technology and culture also became much more blurred in the Republican period. The debate in 1925 between an Istanbul MP, Hamdullah Suphi, and an Erzurum MP, Ziya Hoca, in the National Assembly is highly illustrative in this respect. Ziya Hoca was against excessive Westernisation, which according to him meant importing corruption together with the positive aspects of civilisation. Hamdullah Suphi was rather ironic in his reply. Could civilisation be stopped at the bor-

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

61

der and a committee assess the value of each imported item in terms of Turkish nationalism: ‘What is this? A locomotive ... Let it pass. What is this other one? Dance ... No, we don’t want it, throw it away ...’ (cited by Tunaya 1996: 108). Tanr›över gives even further ‘dangerous’ examples to illustrate the impossibility of distinguishing between the good and the bad — namely, technological and cultural aspects of civilisation. According to him, if factories came, then the worker-employer struggle would also come: ‘When factories are here, we cannot stop the entering of socialist principles’ (cited by Tunaya 1996: 108). The dilemma was indeed paralyzing. However, rather than working out the dilemma in substantial terms, the national elite found a pragmatic solution by accepting Western civilisation in appearance but denying its social consequences, such as class struggle, with the aim of creating a solid mass: the nation. My contention is that Occidentalism has not masked but utilised these conflicts in order to consolidate and legitimise power both in the eyes of the West and the people. Occidentalism functioned as a flexible format of power by constantly distinguishing the sayable and the unsayable, hence creating a negotiable gap between words and practice, consequently between the two orders of truth discussed above. In practical terms, the Kemalists who organised themselves as the Republican People’s Party (RPP) had to develop policies to both silence and accommodate various oppositions.73 Turkey had to follow a similarly balancing international policy which oscillated between abolishing the privileges of Western forces and their collaborators inside and making new political and economic alliances with Western countries.74 The fascist regimes of Germany and Italy influenced the political vision of Turkish nationalism until the end of World War II,75 but this was counterbalanced by efforts to establish friendly relations with Britain. Similarly, while on the one hand positive interstate relations were maintained with the Soviet Union,76 the socialist and communist movements within the country were crushed on account of their links to the Soviet Union. Hence, boundary management was at work not only internally, but also in the international arena. The principles of Kemalism, usually known as the six arrows that symbolised the RPP, were coined at the beginning of the 1930s: Republicanism, Nationalism, Populism, Statism, Laicisism, Revolutionism/Reformism. In 1937, these principles were incorporated into the constitution, defining the nature of the Turkish state. Nevertheless, all the principles were controversial.77 Yet, despite all the complexities and controversies regarding policies, informed by both internal and external historical factors, the ideology of Kemalism appeared as more or less unified politics towards the end of the

62

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

1930s. This was partly due to the deployment of anti-democratic laws and measures that silenced the various religious, ethnic and political oppositions in the country. Also, by that time, many of the reforms associated with Turkish national identity had been accomplished, at least on paper.78 The short time-span of the reforms, together with their seemingly radical nature, succeeded in attracting the attention of Western visitors and observers. For example, Arnold Toynbee, one of the architects of the Western partition plan of the Ottoman Empire who had recorded the ‘hopeless situation’ of Turkey after World War I (F. Ahmad 1993: 46-7), praised the ‘Turkish state of mind’ for its revolutionary character: ‘L’Empire Ottoman est mort; vive la Turquie!’ (Toynbee 1925: 558). Harold Bowen, in his ‘British Contribution to Turkish Studies,’ identified the recovery of Turkey as a ‘political miracle,’ especially noting the ‘miraculous restoration’ of AngloTurkish friendship (1945: 56). Eleanor Bisbee, who admired the ‘New Turks’ called ‘everybody interested in trends of civilization, the fate of nations, and the capacity of humans to change their own lives’ to turn to the story of the Turks (1951: ix). She made use of the metaphor of the bridge identity to emphasise the importance of Turkey.79 Turkish nationalists surely managed to draw ‘the attention of the entire world’ (Dumont 1984: 41). However, it is highly debatable whether the reforms or revolutions of the 1930s and 1940s transformed the entire society according to the desired image. I have mentioned in the introduction that there is a significant critique of Kemalism in Turkey today, which points to the limits of the popular hegemony of this nation-making ideology. But Kemalists, too, or more broadly the national elite at that time, were aware of the limited reach of the changes even during this period. For example, Yakup Kadri, the persistent critical voice among the national elite, referred to various symptoms in society in order to state that ‘with a couple of new legal codes, a couple of orders to the mayor, the police and the gendarmerie ... we assume that everything has already changed; we do not realise that these codes or orders are not capable of changing, let alone minds, not even appearances’ (1971: 91). How could Anatolia with its long history of different religions, ethnicities and languages be made ‘purely’ Turkish (and Muslim in principle)? How could a nation be built on a blank page? How could, in such a short time, these fierce conflicts and contradictions be resolved: dismissing Islam from government and law, yet reproducing it as the basis of Turkish-ness, especially against the non-Muslim populations in the country; making modern women the new icon of the regime, yet negotiating with the local patriarchal traditions to limit the changes in women’s roles; governing such a heterogeneous population by a rigid official discourse, which rested on the

OCCIDENTALISM: HISTORY AND THEORY

63

idea of a solid mass and denial of differences; all the while declaring independence from all social, political and economic influences of the West, heralding Western civilisation. All these conflicts point to the limits of the hegemony of the new power regime, and they also bear witness to the role of state violence in Turkey when hegemony could not be forged. However, these limits should also be seen as the historical conditions for the production and reproduction of the Occidentalist fantasy. If there was any hegemony of the so-called Turkish nation, it did not lie in the consent given to the official ideology, but in the opportunities of agency and power in the newly opened space of maneuver for being both modern and national — namely, Occidentalism. I would like to conclude this section by asserting that the notion of full modernisation could only be incorporated at the level of fantasy and of the performance that sustained it. ‘Going to the people’ as the essential strategy of populism, which led to the establishing of People’s Houses,80 soon was replaced by ‘talking about the people.’ The body of the people was denied through symbolism, while their spirit was retained in fantasy. Children would hear on Ankara Radio a song that included the words ‘there is a village far away/ even if we do not go there, even if we do not see it/ it is our village.’ These words, not very persuasive as such, signify evident physical distance together with spiritual proximity to the periphery; they could only be associated with reality through the technological medium of radio. We will see how the heterogeneous population targeted by radio is reduced to a ‘spirit,’ and how this ‘spirit’ has guided radio broadcasting in its address to the disembodied audience in the next chapter. The Occidentalist fantasy that replaced a sense of historicity evokes a field of intimacy and inner truth that is not registered in history, yet continues to define culture and identity. I have started this chapter by discussing the missing archives and the personalised memoirs as the symptoms of this other truth. These are the non-representable components of a political subjectivity that has been historically Othered by the West. They provide an entry point to problematise what has been written as official history. I have attempted here to give a general theoretical and historical background for interpreting the symptoms. However, the full interpretation of these and other symptoms awaits the new narratives of those who have been silenced in and by history, which I hope will gain a richer meaning in the new theoretical space opened by discussions of Occidentalism. In the following chapter, I invite the readers to hear the voice of the nation, as disseminated by Turkish Radio, which seems to be a technological monologue but in fact always in dialogue with other voices on the air.

Back cover. Radyo, vol.1, no.3, 15 February 1942.

3 THE STUDIO AND THE ‘VOICE OF THE NATION’

In this chapter, I will trace the history, structure and discursive limits of radio broadcasting in Turkey through the prism of Occidentalism. I will dwell on three aspects: First, I will show how Ankara Radio gained prominence in the 1930s and became associated with national culture, as opposed to cosmopolitan Istanbul Radio, and how this entailed boundary management between the past and the present, the foreign and the native. The way in which the cities of Istanbul and Ankara were opposed to each other in this context is highly interesting and significant. Secondly, I will discuss radio’s position in relation to state and nation, Turkish Radio’s broadcasting policies and programmes, as well as the conception of audience, in order to depict how radio technology was perceived and employed by the elite to create a ‘pure national voice.’ The attempts of mediation between the essential culture of the people and Western civilisation have been central to experimenting with the voice of the nation. The debate on Turkish alaturka music is one significant example of this. Finally, I will discuss the frustrations and anxieties involved in that very experiment, the persistent worries, in terms of both technical matters and content for achieving a pure voice of the nation on radio. We will see that the virtual viewpoint of the West, as well as the virtual conceptions of the audience as the people, figure in this and other examples as primary sources of problematisation. Radio and National Identity Radio in Turkey set up an environment to experiment with elements of national identity in the studio, by utilising technological facilities. At the same time, radio was a key symbol of modernity and universal progress, as it was in many other peripheral nations.1 The national and the modern were to be bridged by both technological and symbolic functions of radio. However,

66

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

it is difficult to contend to what extent radio was successful in mediating the modern and the national in Turkey, since we see in this process an incredible effort of creativity as much as a lack of efficiency, very strict rules of control as much as a lack of organisation and discipline. In fact, it is possible to say that radio could not become an ideally controlled laboratory due to these conflicting tendencies. Nevertheless, the process of experimentation, although it failed to sustain sterile laboratory conditions, portrayed the distinctive features of Turkish modernity shaped under the Western gaze and in dialogue with it. Social fantasy played an important role in this process, giving a certain reassurance to the creative actors of the Occidentalist experiment, a reassurance that the modern nation really existed despite all the doubts and insecurity introduced by the comparison with the projected Western model. National identity is at once very real and ambiguous; it is difficult to set the temporal and spatial boundaries of national identity as such, since the nation can only be defined through its differentiation from other nations. The ‘origin’ of the nation is dependent on ‘a differentiation of nations which has already begun’ (Bennington 1994: 241) in a historical process of wars and conflicts, and that sets ‘us’ against ‘them.’ However, national identity is not only signified through a single opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The nation is also a temporal construction, a form of temporality that is already divided. The signification of national identity refers to both past and future; pre-modern as well as modern elements; an ‘authentic essence’ and a radical break with tradition at the same time. As Zizek argues, ‘“nation” designates at one and the same time the instance by means of reference to which traditional “organic” links are dissolved and the “remainder of the pre-modern in modernity”’ (1991: 20). The crucial point, according to Zizek, is to conceive both aspects in their interconnection. And the problem of legitimacy resulting from the incongruity between the claim of a radical break with tradition and the reality of history (Osborne 1995) can only be settled in the present time. The present-ness is the principle that articulates, orders and justifies, although not without problems, the contradictory references in a national discourse. The temporal character of the signification of national identity could clearly be observed in radio broadcasting, which continually emphasises and displays its present-ness. Radio broadcasting radically alters the perception of time by annihilating the gap between past and future — by juxtaposing them in the moment of now. Radio stages a play of sounds that is always now and here and that bridges the gap between its source and its projection by its ‘impact both outwardly and inwardly at once — destroying the illu-

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

67

sion of difference between exterior and interior, perceiver and perceived’ (Dyson 1994: 170). Thus, radio also redefines space by creating a mediated location, ‘a social/temporal location joining source and listener in the instant of a sound’ (Berland 1994: 35). I would claim that Turkish Radio was not only functional in reprocessing the past to be consumed in the present, but also in connecting the different fields of representation that seemed difficult to bridge. Radio was at the intersection point of (1) culture and civilisation: Radio represented Western modernity and progress in its very technological form, but it was also a means of communicating cultural messages that uniquely belonged to the nation; (2) education and entertainment: It was seen as a vehicle for mass education, but had to be entertaining if it was going to have any impact on the audience; (3) the elite and the people: In the definition of broadcasting it was implied that radio talked to the masses, namely the people: yet, the elite were keen to disseminate their own values and criteria as markers of modernity; (4) private and public: Radio was perceived as an apparatus for reorganising the public domain of national life by implanting modern values to society; yet, it had to address the people generally in their private realm, in their intimate domestic settings. The bridging of these different fields has been important to resolve one of the most important problems in the making of the nation: the absent people. By imagining the people as if they were present in the national unity envisaged through the technique of radio broadcasting, citizens that were silenced and absent in the national project could be represented as the constitutive element of the nation in the very address of radio. The strategies of Turkish Radio that have attended to the gaps between the past and the present, between the West and Turkey (or, more specifically, between the serious and masculine image of politics, and the more feminine and sentimental field of popular culture), and between the pre-modern essences ascribed to the nation and modern ways of living constitute important objects of study in this context. Although a relative late-comer,2 the history of Turkish Radio between 1936 and 1950 bears some resemblances to the early practices of radio broadcasting in liberal countries, such as Great Britain and the USA. Radio has been one of ‘the appropriate techniques for managing a population in democracy’ (Donald 1992: 78), and the ‘setting up of and legitimating of distinctions between the culture of the elite and the culture of popular tastes’ (Johnson 1988: 4). Burhan Belge, a Turkish broadcaster, confirmed the democratic nature of radio when he said that ‘radio is very democratic equipment. It is as if invented for the people ... Just as they say, “nations are

68

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

ruled by governments they deserve,” the national radio reflects the level of ideas, art and culture of a particular nation.’3 But at the same time Turkish Radio shared much with the radio of German and Italian totalitarian regimes. For example, one of the basic arguments for nationalising radio in Turkey was inspired by the deliberated mission of Italian radio to create awareness about moral and national values (Richeri 1980: 4). However, Turkish Radio also had its own unique features despite similarities with both liberal and totalitarian cases. One of the most peculiar characteristics of Turkish Radio had been its conception of the audience. Different from all the above examples, Turkish Radio did not attempt to know the demands and reactions of the audience; it did not even venture to incorporate audience research, even as a token, into its programming. The audience remained always an assumed and imagined entity. I will discuss this prominent feature of Turkish Radio, which I connect with Occidentalism, in more detail in the following pages. As I have indicated above, there exists no comprehensive research on Turkish radio broadcasting. The archives pertaining to the correspondence among broadcasters or between the radio station and other national institutions are missing. Similarly, there has been no systematic sound or written archive of radio programmes. Apart from a few scholarly manuscripts,4 the memoirs, interviews, and essays written on radio, as well as the journal Radyo stand out as precious resources for researching the history of Turkish Radio. Albeit informed by both the existing sources and my own findings, the aim here is not to reconstruct the history of radio broadcasting; instead, I attempt to problematise some themes by reading existing narratives and facts, emerging discourses and non-discursive practices together and against each other within the framework of Occidentalism. The Introduction of Radio to Turkey: The Tension of the Foreign and the Native The first experiments with radio broadcasting started even before the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Ruflen Ferit Kam, a musician, remembers a particular event around 1920, when the music broadcast from a French ship in Istanbul could be heard by the students of Istanbul University (cited in Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 11). Another experiment was conducted by Rüfltü Uzel, a professor who designed the broadcasting apparatus himself and made possible the broadcasting of music, again in one of the auditoriums of Istanbul University. Nedim Veysel ‹lkin, who became the Director of the General Bureau of Press and Publications in 1945, has a vivid memory of this fascinating event:

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

69

We were in the lecture room of the old Istanbul University. There was a big crowd of native and foreign guests. There was a huge black apparatus that resembled a big chest placed on a table near the window. There were black speakers that were like big trombones around it ... We listened to the explanations with excitement. We were impatient to witness the experiment ... I still remember the creaky sounds. We listened more to atmospherics than to music in this first experience.5 The demonstration showed to the large number of guests how a concert in a nearby building could be relayed live to the lecture room in the university. ‹lkin’s narrative of the experience is focused on the ‘miraculous’ technological artifact, the radio set. The radio set described in this passage looks like a fetish. The narrative, which engages more with the appearance of that big black box than with the creaky sounds that came out of it, reveals the awe that technology created. The perception of radio as a modern object accompanied and even guided the perception of sounds. Radio was a foreign and modern object that represented other worlds in the context of the self-conscious and rapid process of modernisation as Westernisation in the 1920s. While the amateur experiments of radio broadcasting continued, the government decided to establish central radio broadcasting in 1926. A legal decree of 1926 delegated the rights of radio broadcasting normally belonging to the state to a private company for a period of ten years by means of a special contract. The company was to enjoy the authority to manage the transmitters in Ankara and Istanbul and had the right to build transmitters in other cities approved by the government. The company, named Telsiz Telefon Türk Anonim fiirketi (TTTAfi),6 had 70 per cent of its capital donated by the state. The revenues of the company were based on the annual license fees from the listeners, the donations of other national institutions and charity organisations, and a certain percentage of the total income of radio sets imported to the country. The same company enjoyed the privilege to market radio sets in Turkey. It is interesting that the journal Telsiz (Wireless) that the company published not only contained news on broadcasting but also advertisements for radio sets, which were named ‘wireless telephone receivers’ at that time. It was Telsiz that started the first advertising campaign in Turkey, promising a free receiver for five coupons to be collected from the journal. The journal’s mission was to promote radio and spread the ‘magic,’ not only with the aim of education but also business. Yet, whether the company radio had purely Turkish origins has been a matter of dispute. There were rumours that the company was in fact a Turkish-French joint venture. Kocabaflo¤lu has argued that this is a misun-

70

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

derstanding due to the use of the French language in the first broadcasts (1980: 14), since the opening and closing announcements were made in two languages: Turkish and French. The radio station employed presenters only if they were fluent in both languages.7 The programme schedules were also published in both French and Turkish in Telsiz. However, against Kocabaflo¤lu’s contention, a document of the American Embassy dated 1927 (which I happened to receive from one of the former broadcasters I interviewed) supports these rumours; the document claims that, even though the company had a Turkish name, it was in fact a Turkish-French joint venture. The embassy’s report was confident that most of the technological equipment of the so-called Turkish Radio was provided by a distinguished French company, Compaigne Française de Radio.8 Although it is not possible to verify either of the claims, given the lack of sound evidence, the image of foreign-ness attached to radio in its early years is itself significant. One reason for the association of the first Turkish Radio with a foreign company could be that prior to the foundation of the Republic all means of communication, such as telegraph and telephone, were in the hands of foreigners. The policy of the new regime had been to ‘remove foreigners from various positions.’9 Yet, suspicions persisted that some Turkish businessmen collaborated with foreign investors; especially some with close contacts to the government made use of the resources of the state bank, ‹fl Bank, to this end (Atay 1969: 456; Ökçün 1971).10 The corruption implied by the rumours can be positioned within the politics informed by Occidentalism. On the one hand, there were popular campaigns in radio and other media for promoting domestic goods and presenting their consumption as a vital national concern. Foreign-ness was introduced in this context as a threat against which Turkish identity had to be obsessively discovered and defined. However, importing foreign technologies and collaborating with foreign companies were considered a profitable venture for a group of businessmen who comprised the national elite. The ambiguity evokes the historical conditions for understanding the boundary management of foreign-ness and nativism in radio broadcasting, which also translates into the mediation between the (Western) modern and the national. The decision of 1926 to begin radio broadcasting in Turkey by establishing radio stations in both Istanbul and Ankara was presented to the public as elevating Turkey to the level of other civilised countries. The government declaration concerning the inauguration of radio broadcasting shows how radio and Turkey were thereby positioned in the civilised world:

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

71

In accordance with article 406, for serving the general interests within the boundaries of the Turkish Republic, and with the aim of transmission and propagation of political, economic, social and scientific news, talks, conferences and concerts, and information about weather conditions; and other issues that wireless telephone stations take up and transmit in all civilised countries to people with the advent of science ... (emphasis added).11 The government’s discourse makes evident use of the notions of science and civilisation to justify the foreign-ness of radio technology. However, the memoirs describing how the first radio broadcasts started under the existing conditions prioritise personal relations and intimacy in order to give an account of the foreign-ness of radio for Turkish society. The first director of Istanbul Radio, Hayreden, describes the first days of radio as follows: In 1926, Sedat Nuri Bey came to me saying that they wanted to start a radio station, and asking me whether I would be interested in its technical management. I said yes. He knew that I was very much interested in wireless. He had seen before wires, microphones in my house and inquired about them, and I explained to him how a ‘wireless’ works. Then we started recruiting people for the new task ... We were finally ready but there was no audience ... I had to give some practical lessons in a room on top of the post office for three weeks so that people understood what it was, what a wireless was, and told their friends and neighbours about it, and helped them set the antennas and sets ...12 Hayreden’s account does not only evoke the poor technical conditions, but also implies how some people, including himself and his friends, were more advanced in issues of Western technology when compared to ‘ignorant’ others. Cevat Aslan also makes this clear when he says that there was a general anxiety among the elite in those days that ‘the backward people were not ready to digest this novel technology’ (cited in Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 21). Some members of the political elite were even against the inauguration of radio broadcasting. It was ultimately Mustafa Kemal, the leader, who had to make the final decision. Hayreden narrates in his memoirs how he took a radio receiver to Mustafa Kemal for a demonstration: Some people had mentioned to him the idea of starting radio broadcasting, and he had said, ‘Let him bring the machine, so we shall listen to it.’ So one day I took a receiver that I had made myself to him in his

72

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

residence in Orman Çiftli¤i. While searching for stations, just by chance we got the Russian Radio. Atatürk had been in Sofia as a diplomat could understand some Russian. He listened for a while, then all of a sudden he hushed everyone: ‘Efendiler,’13 he said, ‘Look, they are making propaganda.’ And then he ordered the radio station to be built immediately (cited in Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 22, emphasis added). As clearly shown in this dramatised scene, the official discourse that Turkey should be part of the civilised world had other connotations. Behind the display of the rhetoric of modernity, there was a field of political struggle, and also of business. Some people had vested interests in starting radio broadcasting as a profitable business, while others opposed the idea, most probably due to conflicts as to who would enjoy the favours of the state. If the former referred to modernity for justifying their practices, it is significant that the latter brought up issues related to the people. The seeming conflict between the discourses of modernity and the people could only be resolved through the performative act of power. The political leader pointing to realistic concerns about propaganda, evoking the field of power, set a pragmatic vantage point through which the apparent dilemmas had a chance of resolution. Here we see that Occidentalism, which entails the continuous play of being Western and anti-Western, gains stability and consistency only by reference to power and order. However, when the official discourse became consolidated, its background dynamics could be rendered invisible. Hayreden’s personal memoirs, although pointing to important experiential dimensions of the history of radio broadcasting, have no significant value for writing history today. These stories remain amusing anecdotes; albeit marginal, they continue to point to the limits of the discourse written as history. Nevertheless, Mustafa Kemal’s final decision that led to the establishment of radio broadcasting in Turkey could not eradicate all worries about radio’s foreign-ness. Many members of the elite continued to blame TTTAfi for importing ‘immoral’ culture from the West in their broadcasts and, consequently, not being nationalistic enough. The process of the nationalisation of radio was accelerated by these kinds of worries and accusations against ‘the company radio.’ When radio was finally nationalised and based in Ankara as the place of ‘pure’ national culture, as opposed to Istanbul as the centre of cosmopolitan entertainment, the boundary management between the native and the foreign was transposed to one within the country.

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

73

The Company Radio: The Tension between Istanbul and Ankara Both Istanbul and Ankara Radio shared similar inadequate technical conditions when they were first established. Their transmissions started as temporary short broadcasts during the day, which only over time became longer and more regular. Although radio broadcasts did not enjoy much coverage in the newspapers at that time,14 the broadcasts of Istanbul Radio were still given more coverage than those of Ankara Radio, especially towards the end of 1928. The daily programme schedules of Istanbul Radio were published in newspapers, together with those of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Milano and Bratislava. It is noteworthy that Istanbul figured in a different conception of the modern at that time, not yet nationalised. Istanbul was perceived as a cosmopolitan city sharing the same universe with other cities of the world, thus still retaining its foreign-ness.15 In a similar way, radio broadcasting was not yet adequately national. The announcements were still made in both Turkish and French; furthermore, radio did not address the nation in a particular format, but just talked to ‘listeners’ in its announcements. The broadcasting of Istanbul and Ankara Radio, in their first years, mainly consisted of music, news bulletins prepared by the Anatolian Agency, and stock exchange and cereal market news.16 There were also some talks on the new Turkish reforms, on the modern transformations of the Turkish family, as well as related to campaigns, such as promoting the use of domestic goods. Generally, talks were marginal in comparison to music broadcasting.17 Both Istanbul and Ankara Radio, between 1927 and 1936, broadcast Western music, which included mostly Classical and some dance music. However, they also tried to give equal space to Turkish music.18 The special music bands organised by the radio station performed the music broadcasts on Istanbul Radio; also, musicians working in the clubs and cafes were invited to perform live concerts on the air. Istanbul Radio was privileged in that respect since it could rely on the rich culture of music and entertainment in the city. All famous musicians of the time — such as Safiye Ayla, Hamiyet Yüceses, and Zehra Bilir — could be heard on Istanbul Radio. Also, most of the saz19 players of the city were employed by Istanbul Radio.20 In contrast, Ankara Radio had to depend mostly on the Riyaseticumhur Müzik Tak›m›, a military band officially organised by the state, which performed both Western and Turkish music. The director of the band, Veli Kan›k, was also the director of Ankara Radio. The political and cultural environment of the cities in which they took place shaped the broadcasts. And it was Istanbul that was obviously more advantageous in terms of cultural background.

74

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Istanbul Radio, which enjoyed generally longer hours of transmission,21 and which was regarded as more important than Ankara Radio by the company (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980:58), was conceived as possibly replacing the rich entertainment life of the city. It was considered a medium for entertainment, that is ‘civilised and, by all means, contemporary,’ that is also ‘pleasurable, inexpensive and aesthetic.’22 A technical booklet about radio claimed that There is a beat23 going on in the big studio of Istanbul wireless telephone every evening. Why go to far places and spend lots of money to listen to saz? ... Why sit in crowded and polluted theatre halls and suffer just to have some pleasure and amusement? It is intolerable, isn’t it? (fiemsi 1927: 4) The meaning attached to radio here, as a modern medium of entertainment (both individualised and accessible to all), was soon to be problematised by the national elite. Hence, there appear at this moment diverging paths for how to interpret modernity as it manifested itself on the radio. I find it important to refer to Kocabaflo¤lu’s way of describing the problem for its implications in regard to Occidentalism. He posits two alternatives: When radio broadcasting started in our country, there were two alternatives as to what radio’s social function would be, how its policies would be shaped, in other words, what would its model be. The first alternative was a bourgeois radio with the aim of comforting those people who come home from work exhausted and do not usually have the opportunity for going to a nightclub or music hall. The second one was a radio broadcasting that aims to educate and raise the awareness and consciousness of the people on social questions, and was listened to in communal settings (1980: 76). If the model for the former was the USA, the latter referred to the model of the Soviet Union. According to Kocabaflo¤lu, early Turkish Radio opted for the first alternative, which turned it into a corrupt medium of entertainment. However, if we re-visit the argument from a different perspective, we could interpret the problem differently. I would argue that, at this specific historical moment, the elite had yet to choose between being liberal and allowing the undisciplined modern and cosmopolitan (and not national) culture of Istanbul, and being vigilant in the disciplinary task of creating a national culture from nothing in Ankara. Given that cosmopolitanism was

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

75

fed by local sources and was more enjoyable, and that national culture at that time only corresponded to the dry performances of the military band on Ankara Radio, the split was indeed a difficult one. In other words, the choice was between a concept of the modern, not yet domesticated by nationalism, and the ideal of the national, not yet really substantiated in cultural terms. The opposition between Istanbul and Ankara can be read in this context. I have briefly discussed in the introduction how Ankara (as opposed to Istanbul) was chosen as the capital of the new republic to be the ‘ground zero’ of the nation. The task to be realised in Ankara therefore was to both import Western standards of life as part of modernisation and discipline the corrupt and immoral tendencies of too much Western-ness within nationalisation. I have also mentioned that the task seemed a big burden to the elite, who openly preferred life in Istanbul to that in Ankara. The making of the nation was at the same time a question of self-discipline. We will see how the elite, including the leader Mustafa Kemal, had to repress their own tastes, for example, in music, when they had to choose the path of creating national culture. Radio became one of the primary institutions for disciplining the elite, under its mission of educating the people. The criticism targeted at the ‘company radio’ at the beginning of the 1930s reflects a turning point in the disciplining of the modern in national terms. An MP and the chief editor of the journal Yeni Adam, ‹smay›l Hakk› Baltac›o¤lu was an active defender of national values,24 especially against the corrupt modernity associated with Istanbul Radio. He harshly criticised the perception of radio as entertainment and luxury, namely ‘solely as a medium of music,’25 and argued that radio should be nationalised and put under the new ideals of the nation. Another cultural journal openly targeted the radio as a ‘centre of transmission which had not adopted the mission to work for the national culture; its music broadcasts corrupt the discipline of music and culture.’26 Turkish Radio was also problematised with reference to examples in other countries, such as the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy, which used radio as an efficient instrument of culture (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 78-9). That these examples were listed in the same breath without any substantiation of the differences between, for example, socialism and fascism reveals that the dominant tendency which opted for the centralisation and control of culture in Turkey had no clear content at that point in time. But it was clear that the elite had a mission in that process. According to several leading journalists, the state ‘should adopt a policy for introducing radio broadcasting as an influential tool in the public arena of villages and towns along with its other policies for language, roads and factories.’27 The concept of disciplining people then could gain some content.28 It was said that radio could have an

76

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

important role in transmitting modern knowledge, for example, to peasants about farming, childcare and education, and the prevention of diseases. Baltac›o¤lu even suggested that a radio university and music academy should be established. What was envisaged in these statements was a much more rigidly controlled and totalised modern national identity using radio as an instrument. The reactions of the members of the company TTTAfi to the harsh criticism are highly interesting in that they reveal that the dispute was not only about different political ideologies, but also about the ways in which the modern nation and the role of the elite within it were imagined. The members of the company spoke as businessmen who were much more realistic and still did not embrace the fantasy of the modern nation. For example, against the criticism that radio broadcast the same songs all over again (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 60), one of the directors of the company radio implied the limited role of radio in introducing and establishing a totally new national culture: All right ... we are just tradesmen. We have to give the customers what they want. But a song only lasts three minutes. How many new songs do you think are produced in Turkey in a year? Let’s say 100, then it would amount to 300 minutes. How can we fill the four long hours of transmission with this?29 Here the director of radio speaks not as a national educator, but as a businessman. Consequently, for him the audience did not mean the people, but customers. Hence, he spoke of radio as a medium that was not invested with meanings of national culture, but merely as an instrument of fashion, which was nothing but the repetition of the new, akin to the logic of commodities in capitalism, as Walter Benjamin would say. In fact, the numbers justified the above perspective. In 1927, there were only 1,178 people with registered radio sets in Turkey; 1 per cent of these were owned by foreigners, and 30 to 40 per cent by minorities concentrated in Istanbul. It was inevitable that the supply was shaped by the demand. Furthermore, there were serious technical inadequacies. How could radio under these conditions embody national claims? The directors of the company radio readily admitted the scarcity of resources for programming and the poor technical quality of the broadcasts. In this sense, the broadcasters did not make an effort to present their performances in a national rhetoric. The civilising mission loosely attached to radio in the beginning did not have a transcendental meaning beyond the

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

77

local experiences of the broadcasters. For example, the memoirs of broadcasters from this period are full of silly events that convey the poor conditions of broadcasting then. The noise from the street or the hotel — in which Ankara Radio’s studio was set for a while — interfered with broadcasting; the main flow of programmes was interrupted to broadcast news of a fire in the building next door; the presenters leaned out of the window to give the weather report; they covered microphones with nylon stockings to improve the quality of sound; and they erred in their words while they were presenting programmes.30 These stories reveal the immediate experience of local time and space instead of the homogeneous and totalised temporality and space of the nation. The studio in its surroundings was not yet isolated and abstracted from life. It is striking that the memoirs from later periods, when radio was nationalised, also narrate similar silly stories, but woven in a very different structure of sentiment. In these, we see a sense of mission and, above all, a love for this mission. For example, Hasan Refik Ertu¤, the head of Istanbul Radio in 1949, said: ‘The aim is always to find something new to broadcast, to come up with new ideas ... I advise the future broadcasters to put their souls in their work. Artificial aspirations or passions do not have any value.’31 It is clear that by now the path of the national-modern had been chosen and that the cosmopolitan modern had been discarded. Broadcasters had to show great effort, putting their souls into their work, in order to make possible what seemed impossible. The national discourse had to be isolated from lived experience; the radio studio would have to be isolated better in order to experiment with the contents of the national. The broadcasters had to be placed differently in radio. Radio Becomes the Voice of the Nation In the mid-1930s, the elite was ‘more systematically geared towards creating a new culture’ (Kad›o¤lu 1996: 187).32 The six principles of Kemalism — Republicanism, Nationalism, Populism, Statism, Laicism, and Revolutionism/Reformism — were launched in 1931. The practical outcome of the discursive consolidation of the regime was to treat social and cultural questions, which were still embedded in personal networks to a great extent, within a centrally and abstractly formulated normative discipline. Culture and everyday life were regarded as important targets of discipline in order to create the ‘new man.’ Baltac›o¤lu, who was the founder of the journal Yeni Adam (New Man), described the ‘new man’ as opposed to the ‘old’:

78

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

The old man thinks first of himself, and then his family. The new man thinks first of his nation, then his family, and finally himself. For the old man, death is the end. For the new man, death is neither the beginning nor the end. Newness means having faith in the national community and sacrificing one’s soul for its soul.33 Newness could only be achieved by a new perception of the self, new moral standards, a new language, and a new history in the prescribed hierarchy. The new man was a synonym for the new Turk, the essential characteristics of which were to be studied in institutions, such as the Turkish Language Institute, the Turkish History Institute and the People’s Houses. However, the cultural nationalism fostered by these institutions was not enough for crafting the new man in all its dimensions, including emotions. Baltac›o¤lu was keen to discipline emotions, for which he enlisted radio as well as other media, such as theatre, film, books, journals, and newspapers.34 After all, Mustafa Kemal had said: ‘You should be able to transform the great ideal that we are fighting for, from an idea into an emotion in the hearts of the people.’35 It is in the light of this emphasis on the new man and his emotions that radio would find its new mission. Music was certainly one of the most important fields for disciplining emotions. Music reflects the embodied life — its senses, rhythm and pleasure. The critics of company radio were not only complaining about radio becoming a ‘music box,’36 but also about the shameful quality of the music broadcasts. The criticism mostly centered on the unwanted effects of what was called alaturka music.37 Alaturka, which was supposedly Turkish music, as categorised and named by Western sources, constituted a big topic for debate concerning its national status. Alaturka music, even in the last days of the Ottoman Empire, had derogatory connotations for pro-Westerners.38 Although the West had named this music ‘Turkish,’ the Turkish national elite was disturbed by the inferior status it had to acquire as Oriental music in their projection of desired Western-ness. Therefore, they denied that it was Turkish. As Ziya Gökalp had argued before, it was essentially Byzantine and ‘Eastern.’39 In the 1930s, most members of the national elite were extremely unhappy about both the technical and moral standards of alaturka, as it was heard on the air. This type of music was labeled as immoral and associated with ‘alcoholism’ and ‘lustful feelings.’40 According to the critics, it was unbearable to listen to its ‘wailing.’ The words used for criticising alaturka music (such as ‘beastly’ or ‘clumsy’) were quite strong and derogatory. It was not only the intellectuals and the journalists who were critical, but also the

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

79

politicians. The Minister of the Interior said in the National Assembly in 1934 that the state had an obligation to intervene in the performance of this kind of music, which provoked sexual instincts, now that alaturka was not confined to the taverns and cafes, but could also be heard on the air through radio (cited in Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 90). The criticism targeting alaturka is retrospectively regarded as a consequence of the Music Reform gaining impetus in 1934.41 The Music Reform in principle aimed to develop Turkish music and make it ‘civilised’ by employing Western techniques. This was the declared aim; however, one can see a more complex picture when looking closely at the events leading to the ban on alaturka on the radio. But before doing so, we need to differentiate the two sets of concern that mingled with each other in the criticism directed at the company radio, especially its music broadcasts. One concern pertains to the role that radio must play in disciplining the people in order to create the new man equipped with national sentiments; the other concern relates to the anxieties that a wrong image was being projected to the Western world by this kind of Oriental music, as clearly manifested in the words of Neyzen Tevfik, a musician and a poet: Every evening on radio, I suspect, A boor belches towards the face of the West (cited in Yücebafl 1961).

I suggest that the different concerns of the elite have to be situated in their interconnection in a broader framework in order to gain a deeper understanding. Here, we witness once more a dilemma confronting the elite. Culture was the only field where national identity could be imagined, since the distinction between culture and civilisation in the discourse on the modern nation embraced by Gökalp and other nationalists implied that only technology and certain formats could be borrowed from Western civilisation. Culture had to be distinctively Turkish. However, the existing culture on which cultural institutions, such as radio, could feed was regarded as ‘sickly Oriental,’ in Gökalp’s words. The problem was further complicated by the fact that the existing reality went against the not yet realised ideal, and the principles contradicted the sentiments. Most of the members of the elite, including Mustafa Kemal in fact liked alaturka music. Atay, as a friend and colleague, admitted that Mustafa Kemal ‘liked alaturka music, but believed in Western music. He always listened to alaturka music at home, but defended the Western music for national education ... He was able to crush the rebellions of his heart by his brain’ (1969: 410).

80

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

As I have argued above, the dichotomy (in practice, a dilemma) of culture and civilisation could only be resolved pragmatically through the prism of power in the new regime of the Turkish Republic. Therefore, if one misses the pragmatic references to power in the case of alaturka, the problem will be misrecognised as the state banning alaturka for the sake of Westernisation — a misrecognition that is popularly accepted by the critics of Westernisation in Turkey today. In other words, without attending to the historical context one cannot understand either why alaturka was banned or why it returned to radio in a few years under a new guise. Then, let us look at a series of events: In 1930, Mustafa Kemal gave an interview to a foreign journalist, Emile Ludwig, in which he talked about music. Mustafa Kemal said: ‘You see how much we care for music ... How long did it take Western music to reach its present standards? [400 years] We do not have time to wait that long. You see that we are adopting Western music.’42 The tension-filled words of Mustafa Kemal to make the Westerners see that Turkey was on a rapid move towards modernisation also reveals the internalised Western gaze that has pushed the elite to problematise their own culture, making them ready to judge themselves in the most severe terms. Paradoxically, Mustafa Kemal’s words point to the unstable boundaries of a national identity shaped in a continuous dialogue with the West. The attitude here is not a simply defensive one that clings to its own culture, but it is nevertheless defensive, in the sense that it internalises the lack projected to its self from the Ego-ideal and tries to make it up to its reflected standards. The West, here constitutes the ‘virtual viewpoint of the Ego-ideal,’ in which reflection itself is reflected back into ‘reality’ (Zizek 1991: 15). The ideals of modernisation are assessed in terms of a reflection of the West (its music being developed as opposed to alaturka), which is reflected back to render the state of Turkish music shameful. The Turkish elite saw their culture (which they, in fact, liked) not through the eyes of the West, but through an Occidentalist projection of the West. They were split, in the sense that they could never identify with the Western gaze. They had to build or create their own identity against a projected Western gaze, which remained uncertain and open to changing interpretations, and always a source of frustration because of its uncertainty and arbitrariness. But the persistent anxiety at the same time fed the performance of power. Both the banning of alaturka music on Turkish Radio and its inevitable return illustrate this very dynamic. A speech delivered by Mustafa Kemal in November of 1934 in the National Assembly was taken as a warning against alaturka music on radio. The speech was about reforming Turkish music,43 and it did not contain any

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

81

particular comments regarding radio broadcasts. But Mustafa Kemal’s words about the state of Turkish music — he said, ‘we cannot be proud of it’ — was taken as an inspiration to ban alaturka on radio. The Ministry of the Interior made a declaration the following day: [T]aking inspiration from the enlightening and warning speech of the noble Gazi on alaturka,44 it is declared to those in charge that alaturka music should be totally removed from radio broadcasting as of this evening, and only those music pieces that have been composed by Western techniques and played only by musicians that have a knowledge of Western techniques are to be broadcast.45 Thus, a mastery of Western techniques was made the precondition for the production of national music, while the Western-labeled Turkish music was rejected. The reversal of the meanings of the foreign and the native in this context is striking.46 However, despite the apparent claim to Westernisation, the revolt against Orientalist Western categorisations, such as alaturka, and the reduction of Western civilisation to a technique that can be mastered as if it is a ‘thing’ illustrates the Occidentalist political subjectivity. The anxiety of being Western and national at the same time opens up a field of interpretation and action, which culminates in the consolidation of sovereignty and power. However, the ban on alaturka was not here to stay. Actually, the ban had not covered Turkish folk songs, which continued to be broadcast on radio. The decision on alaturka, which was used as a synonym for the ambiguous category of Turkish music,47 was reversed in 1936. Memoirs pertaining to this period narrate a story of how Turkish music returned to radio. There are several versions of this story,48 but all of them, albeit in different scenes, tell about a conversation believed to pass between Mustafa Kemal and the musician Osman Pehlivan about Turkish music. The stories mention how much Mustafa Kemal liked Turkish music, especially the Rumelian songs that Osman Pehlivan played on his saz, and how he wanted him to play them on the radio. Whether Mustafa Kemal renounced the decision to ban Turkish music on radio or was convinced to change it by Osman Pehlivan’s wise comments, as cited in different versions, the story is significant for showing how intimacy (the internal register of truth) functions in the shaping of policies. Turkish music, once degraded but now loved, would become the national music in the following years, as a result of the fluid boundary management between East and West. Furthermore, Turkish music in its national

82

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

version was produced by appropriating the regionally and ethnically heterogeneous heritage of music and Turkifying it, thereby silencing the different languages of the people. The invention of the tradition of Turkish music — with its own institutions, styles and techniques aggressively defended against intrusions for long years — owes much to Occidentalism. The splits between past and present, or pleasure and duty as inflicted by Westernisation may have been painful, but nevertheless productive for defining the national. Occidentalism was not only functional for defining what was national in relation to the West, but also played an important role in demarcating the boundaries from the so-called East. During the two years when alaturka was banned on radio, people instead listened to Arabic radio stations. Peyami Safa complained that ‘[t]he Turkish people takes the Arabic voice of the Egyptian Radio as his own,’49 and asked radio directors to allow more space for Turkish folk songs on radio.50 The nationalisation of radio in 1936 provided the necessary conditions for experimenting with the contents of ‘authentic Turkish culture,’ including music. The new strategies of Turkish Radio were oriented towards imagining a space that would be free of splits. The antidote for the split between the Western and the Oriental and, hence, duty and pleasure was to recreate a Turkish popular culture that would be both modern and national; that ‘we’ would be proud of and love at the same time. Yakup Kadri said that the Turkish spirit had been ashamed of itself when it met with Western culture and that it had been hiding in a cave or pit since then.51 The ‘box’ that was radio opted to reveal the hidden Turkish spirit with the help of its technology and finally challenge the world. Let me finish here with the sharp words of Burhan Asaf (Belge) regarding the nationalisation of radio: All the media of communication, including press and radio, are or should be in the hands of the Party. Through these media the Party defends the principles of ink›lâp both inside and outside with determination and vengeance ... Ankara Radio should not be broadcasting hicazkâr›-kürdi52 gurgling that has risen from its grave still carrying its sarcophagus, or canned jazz music that is sickening, but instead should make the voice of Ankara’s revolution heard. So that an Emil Ludwig,53 who hears this voice, would be dazzled with astonishment and come running to Ankara to crave a few more interviews. We are a nation that has made one of the manliest revolutions. It is time that we raise our voice and make it heard.54

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

83

Ankara Radio and the Problems of the Pure Voice The cultural nationalism of the 1930s, together with the new legal arrangements to increase the control of the state in all spheres of society,55 laid the groundwork for the nationalisation of radio. A new bureau was established as part of the Ministry of the Interior that would centrally control the ‘public media such as radio, film and theatre,’ which practically meant more state intervention in the outputs of the company radio (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 1145). The nationalisation of radio was carried, very similar to the ban on alaturka, inspired by a speech of Mustafa Kemal at the fourth General Assembly of the RPP in 1935. Mustafa Kemal’s statement was again quite general: ‘It is time that importance should be given to the issue of radio, which is not only vital for national culture but also of highest importance in terms of international concerns.’56 In a year’s time, the government decided not to renew the contract with TTTAfi and to nationalise radio. The government programme reflected the decision as a new mission: ‘The party considers radio as one of the most valuable tools for the cultural and political discipline of the nation. We will establish powerful transmitters. We will provide easy and inexpensive access to radio receivers.’57 The institution of radio underwent a comprehensive re-organisation in line with the decision regarding nationalisation. The operation of transmitters was put under the responsibility of the Post, Telegraphy and Telephone Institute (PTT). In 1937, a new law was passed regarding radio transmitters and broadcasting rights. The government also commissioned the Marconi Company to build new transmitters and a new station for Ankara Radio. Meanwhile, the departments and positions at the radio station were redefined, establishing new job definitions and hierarchies. After a two-year transition period, Ankara Radio officially began its broadcast in its new building on 28 October 1938, a day before the fifteenth anniversary of the Republic. The opening of Ankara Radio embodied a national claim in its announcement: ‘This is Turkish Radio.’ As a consequence of national Ankara winning against cosmopolitan Istanbul, the much-criticised Istanbul Radio was closed until it re-started broadcasting in 1949. Cosmopolitanism was rejected, yet Western civilisation was still celebrated. Prime Minister ‹smet ‹nönü’s speech in English and, later, the words of the Minister of Public Works at the opening ceremony of Ankara Radio positioned radio as a significant symbol of advanced science. The minister talked about radio as one of ‘the highest products of science in the nineteenth century and of global importance in the twentieth century.’ He also thanked the English Marconi company ‘established by Marconi who had invented radio,’ and

84

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

emphasised that radio ‘as the most important and useful application of electrical power’ will ‘more easily let the people know about our being’ and at the same time ‘be a tool showing the level of our progress and development to the advanced nations’ (emphasis added).58 Nevertheless, the claim contradicted the facts and figures. There were about 10,000 radio receivers in Turkey when radio was nationalised. Although the total number reached 33,000 in 1938 and continued increasing, the number was still quite low in proportion to the overall population, about 16 million. Furthermore, 70 per cent of the radio receivers were concentrated in the three big cities, Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, and had very low penetration in the small towns and rural areas.59 The two transmitters built by Marconi — one medium-wave transmitter of 120 kw power, and one short-wave transmitter of 20 kw power — were allocated for internal (Central Anatolia) and external (Central Europe, Balkans and Near East) transmissions respectively. Although the medium-wave transmitter was quite powerful (one of 36 transmitters of the same range in Europe), the Eastern and Southern Eastern regions of Anatolia and Thrace, as well as some areas of Istanbul still had difficulties receiving Ankara Radio transmissions. Yet, despite the evident limitations in transmitting broadcasts to the whole country, radio was regarded as an efficient tool for uniting the nation. The technological imagination played an important role in shaping this perception. The Occidental fantasy that radio was the voice of the nation (that would be simultaneously heard by the people and the world) made the physical barriers — ‘the mountains, the sea, the deserts, the distance, these material and geographical reasons that prevented the integration of the units of the nation’60 — less important. The efforts of reaching out to the people — for example, through the People’s Houses — were replaced by the technological imagination of freely traveling radio waves. The metaphors employed to describe the people changed accordingly. The early Turkish nationalists had talked about the people as the ‘body’ of the nation, while the elite was the ‘head.’61 New metaphors were implemented in the age of radio. For example, in 1942 the prime minister spoke about the nation as a strong body with a ‘head made of light.’ He said: ‘The body functions and the head protects. The entire world will believe, trust in and be proud of this. If anyone has doubts, you will find that their blood is mixed. Their Turkish-ness is suspect.’62 These nationalist, even racist remarks no longer evoked the head as separate from the body, but as mediated through light. Could light be the technological counterpart of faith? Or, could the metaphor of intangible light imply that the eyes would be so dazzled that they would not see

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

85

differences? The voice of the radio was imagined entering ‘the body through the ears,’63 and without changing the conditions of the body, ‘without tiring the eyes and disturbing the body,’64 conquering it from within. Burhan Belge who has frequently referred to radio as ‘seeing with the ears,’ has made a significant statement about the relation of radio to reality: ‘Radio presents not the real artistic or scientific event as such, but a very close replica of it, namely its canned extract.’65 The idea of the canned extract of reality ascribed an inevitable position to the elite who were held responsible for reprocessing reality, canning it, as it were. Then, the reality principle — namely, the test of reality with experience — could be ignored. Interestingly, the People’s Houses, which had the aim of disciplining and uniting the people, also sought help from the radio. Large speakers were placed in the courtyards of the People’s Houses to locally disseminate the broadcasts of Ankara Radio. The People’s Houses — which could not function efficiently, due to the local conditions in many towns,66 such as Silifke, Malatya, Mardin, and Mu¤la — regarded radio as a smooth medium through which the advanced skills of the centre could be transferred to the peripheries; so that ‘not only the hearts, but also the ears and minds’ could be connected to the centre. Radio as ‘an untiring and most easily functioning educator’ could finally realise the disciplining of the people. The role of radio as an untiring educator should be assessed together with new examples of national culture crafted in the radio studios and disseminated to the nation. The most important of these was the creation of a new genre of folk music. Ankara Radio collaborated with the State Conservatory and the Ministry of Education to research and compile examples of folk music around the country, a politically charged effort that did not only technically alter the local and ethnic traditions of music, but also Turkified them, both in terms of language and content (Hasgül 1996: 35). In the previous period, folk music had only been represented on radio with a few local songs known by those musicians who happened to work for radio. However, after 1936 Ankara Radio broadcast examples of folk music in a much more ‘scientific’ way.67 Mustafa Sar›sözen is usually cited as one of the most important musicians who contributed to the development of the folk music repertoire. Mustafa Sar›sözen, a music teacher in Sivas, was appointed to take part in the joint research of the conservatory and the ministry and joined Ankara Radio, making special programmes on folk music. His radio programmes, such as We are Learning a Folk Song and Tunes from the Homeland, had the aim of introducing the people’s music to the nation and to the world. Sar›sözen formulated as their aim to ‘bring together the souls and turn the whole country into a single emotion.’68 When compared to another music programme of

86

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

the same years, called We are Learning a March, which could not continue due to the limited number of existing marches in Turkey, the folk music programmes had a much richer background on which to feed. Songs compiled from the long history of Anatolia were the sources of national culture; in other words, the supply for the never-ending demand for the new on radio came from the nationalisation of Anatolia, which had been the homeland of different religions and ethnicities. The compilation and re-processing of the folk songs entailed a disembodying practice. Local styles of singing as well as accents were evened out, and different languages were translated into Turkish. For example, songs originally in Greek, Armenian and Kurdish were sung in Turkish. Furthermore, the way in which the songs were performed by the strictly trained musicians69 of the Ankara Radio and the conservatory decoupled the songs from the local communities and traditions,70 which had bred them in the first place. In this context, differential temporalities and the experiences of living bodies were opposed to a transcendental idea of love of the country and the nation. Love was to be the product of discipline. Thus, the function of folk music programmes went beyond just substantiating and representing national culture; they also had the mission of teaching national culture to the Westernised elite, hence disciplining their tastes in line with the values of the homeland.71 The undisciplined forms of Western modernity were a big threat for the national identity, as was Oriental-ness. Ankara, signifying the voice of the nation, had to be protected from the ‘immoral’ attractions of Istanbul (signifying the West),72 through the mediation of the essence of the people. The canned extract of reality, in Burhan Belge’s words, was to be processed not only in the field of folk music, but also in other branches of music, such as Classical Turkish Music, which was to replace alaturka. The newly established Classical Turkish Music Choir of Ankara Radio similarly produced an ‘authentic’ style to perform the songs that were compiled, classified and transcribed into musical notes.73 Western classical music was also put under the new disciplinary regime, guided by the famous musician Cemal Reflit Rey, by specialised orchestras for Western symphonic music, dance music, and salon music, performing in the studios of Ankara Radio. The military band Riyaseticumhur Müzik Tak›m› continued its performances. In these years, the radio station performed many live relays of Western music concerts in Ankara, which were enthusiastically supported by Prime Minister ‹nönü, an admirer of Western classical music (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 161-2). Furthermore, the radio music groups had the function of educating a group of students who were expected to master Western music techniques and classical repertoires. The director of Riyaseticumhur Müzik Tak›m› Zeki

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

87

Üngör’s speech to his students conveys the structure of sentiment through which the disciplining activities took place. ‘You are my bacteria,’ he said to his students, ‘you will spread the Western music in Turkey’ (Sun 1969). The strange term ‘bacteria’ most probably signified the disease of modernisation or Western-ness, which nevertheless had to be spread in order to be civilised, but only through the mediating efforts of the national elite. While music constituted a challenging field to experiment with the national/modern, there was also a mission to transform the radio from being solely a music box, the target of earlier criticism. After 1936, programmes that relied on the spoken word proliferated; these were called ‘verbal programmes’ and included news, talks that addressed the general audience as well as special groups (such as children, youth, women, and more marginally, peasants), as well as radio dramas and dramatised sketches. I will discuss radio talks and drama in the following chapters; here, I will primarily dwell on news programmes in order to further elaborate the relation of Turkish Radio to reality. News programmes, despite their significant role in setting the political agenda, were not taken seriously by Turkish Radio at that time. Until a separate news unit was established under the Press and Publications Bureau in 1945, the only source for radio news was the Anatolian Agency, which was dependent on foreign news agencies, such as the British Reuters and the French Havas.74 The news, brought by motorcycle couriers from the agency to the radio, consisted of miscellaneous news items, which were to be organised into a prioritised list by the news presenters. Often, news arrived late and their length was not regular, either too long or too short for the news slot. The lack of systematic treatment in the news programmes once again attracted fierce criticism. The criticism coming from the intellectuals of the period centred mostly on the relatively low proportion of domestic news, the delay in the coverage of foreign news, and the linguistic style of the news programmes (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 224). I find it puzzling that, while on the one hand the state had a very tight control and censorship over the news programmes on radio,75 there was no technical effort to develop them, so as to meet the claim of representing reality. For example, compared to the importance given to radio drama, news programmes remained rather primitive. In contrast to the skillfully managed discursive construction of reality in the BBC news, as we shall see in the following chapter, Turkish Radio preferred to shun realistic representations and instead prioritised the self-referential radio talk and the make-believe world of radio drama. A similar lack of engagement with the existing complex reality could be observed in Turkish Radio’s conception of audience. Different from compa-

88

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

ny radio, which aimed to meet the demands of the customers, the nationalised radio had an abstract and projected image of the audience. One symptom of this was the neglect of audience research. After the first audience research conducted by the company radio in 1927 (primarily regarding the foreign language courses on Istanbul Radio),76 there was no interest in audience research for many years.77 Only in 1948 was a nation-wide radio audience survey conducted by the state, the results of which were published in Radyo.78 The published survey results contain the coded answers produced by a questionnaire about radio programmes, as well as responses to openended questions. In the latter, we see very particular comments — for instance, requests for a story from Suat Tafler, for Hikmet Münir to talk more, for Nurettin Artam to avoid coughing during his talks — together with more major concerns — such as demanding the recitation of the Qur’an, or more domestic news. The survey was presented, in the journal Radyo, as ‘illuminating’ for the future of radio programming, but there appears neither any systematic evaluation of the responses, nor a consideration for reforming the programmes in the light of the responses. It is as if the survey as a form, and not its content, signified a scientific confirmation of radio’s close contact with the people. A few months later, an editorial article published in Radyo revealed more clearly how Turkish Radio conceived of audience research. The main question raised in the article was: ‘How could one measure the performance of a social institution, such as radio? What are the criteria for this?’ The article considered the question from various angles: At first glance, it may seem that in a regime of democracy, public opinion is a perfect and adequate measure. But a deeper inspection will make it clear that public opinion research, albeit one of the fundamental criteria, cannot by itself be a true criterion ... The most important consideration should be whether the product is of high quality.79 The message was clear: if high quality was more important than popularity, then the quality of the radio programmes could be assessed in terms of objective rules, the knowledge of which only belonged to broadcasters. In a similar fashion, Burhan Belge has argued that alaturka music may be liked by the people, especially by those between 30 and 70 years of age today, but if the regime preserved everything the people liked, then there would have been no need for ink›lâp.80 The paternalistic attitude portrayed in the above paragraph has some

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

89

resemblance to that of other national radios in their early years, in which high culture and quality were privileged over the ‘low’ taste of the masses. For example, Reith, the first director of the BBC, said that ‘we are apparently setting out to give the public what we think they need — not what they want’ (McDonnell 1991: 12). However, the BBC had to soften its paternalism in the 1930s in the increased awareness of the differentiated needs and tastes in the audience (Lewis and Booth 1989). For example according to the BBC at War, the news must be timed ‘so as to arrive when most people are at home to listen to it. That means an accurate knowledge of the habits of every audience you are addressing. And the BBC must know not only its habits but its psychology and its special interests’ (45). Audience research emerged as an efficient tool for justifying the production of radio as representative of the people, not only in liberal but also in totalitarian regimes. The most striking example is the case of radio is Nazi Germany in that respect.81 There was more interest in the audience in the Nazi period, compared to the selfacclaimed strategies of radio in the Weimar period, with the aim to target listeners more efficiently (Lacey 1993). This shows that audience research is a discursive tool that may be employed for claiming power and legitimacy. If audience research was a widely used technique of legitimate representation for national radio, then how to explain the fact that Turkish Radio neglected to employ it?82 I contend that the answer should be sought not in the declared missions of Turkish Radio, but in its implicit agenda. Based on the evidence generated by my research, one could argue that having a real impact on people was less of a consideration for Turkish Radio than nationalising and disciplining the elite in the performance of Occidentalism. Turkish Radio did not in any way attempt to include the different languages and ways of life in the country — the differences based on class, ethnicity, religion or region — in its representation of the people. Instead, what was incorporated in the centralised voice of the nation derived from a complex field of negotiations. For example, radio avoided representing the individual experiences of women, and instead talked to women about their family roles. On the other hand, women were employed in radio to present the news, as a part of the modern display for the outside world. Radio broadcast serious talks on the heroic nation and the ‘manliest’ of revolutions, but also about mundane issues, such as how to spend a weekend, or problems with domestic servants, mostly addressed to wealthy urban groups. Yet, local and rural forms of culture, such as folk music, were also appropriated so as to reprocess and make them both national and modern. The technologically produced space of radio was indeed a field of boundary management against the challenges of the West,

90

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

the burden of history and the diversity of existing cultures. At the crossroads of these shifting boundaries emerged the discourse on the modern nation. Technology played an indispensable role in these institutional and political efforts and the new social imaginary for constructing the pure voice of the nation on radio. Great emphasis was put on the technological settings and instruments (such as the studio and the microphone) for defining and reforming the pure voice. The pure voice was also problematised in this respect; for example, the pronunciation and the tone of the presenters and of those who gave lectures on the radio were most often criticised.83 The national elite mostly heard the voices on radio (usually their own voice in talks) as a replica of the national reality, but still was discontent with it. The problem was national, but also technical. As Baltac›o¤lu has pointed out, ‘[r]adio is primarily a voice box, a beautiful voice box ... Remove the beautiful voice, the beautiful talking and singing, radio dies. The beautiful voice is the essence of radio.’84 A beautiful voice, according to him, was a ‘radiophonic’ voice ‘that becomes beautiful when filtered through electrons.’85 Even a normally bad voice could become beautiful through a microphone. The beautiful voice produced through the electron filters, then, was a vital instrument in the cultural laboratory of Turkish Radio. However, despite the strict control and the electron filters provided by the British Marconi company, the voices on radio were disappointing, even frustrating, for the elite.86 The objective criteria for judging high quality had yet to be established; the existing criteria were regarded as ‘distorted,’ and not ‘rational.’87 One of the best examples regarding the problematic relation of the radio voice to reality was the attempt to reproduce a sound record of Mustafa Kemal’s speech delivered on the tenth anniversary of the Republic. The sampled and filtered soundtrack from the available copies of a Russian film was broadcast on Ankara Radio after months of hard work. However, the quality was far from satisfactory. ‘The citizens complained that the voice of Atatürk cannot be that bad.’88 The canned extract of reality on radio, while providing the ground for the Occidentalist fantasy, also revealed the paradoxes of the aural representations of reality.89 Another major source of anxieties was the battle of voices, as it were. The pure national voice was almost impossible to isolate, as there were other voices on the air. Especially during the tense international relations just before World War II, there were deliberate interferences from countries such as the USA and Britain. Besides targeting the Turkish audience through their foreign broadcasts, these countries also used the facilities of Ankara Radio to make regional broadcasts, which completely altered the conception of the world for Turkish broadcasters. When radio broadcasting first started

THE STUDIO AND THE VOICE OF THE NATION

91

in 1927, the world had been more abstract; one of the radio presenters said: ‘I was very tense ... since everybody would hear me. We know the radio of Rome, we know the radio of Paris; we listen to them. I was very tense that my voice would travel into the world’ (emphasis added).90 Very different from the naive technological imagination in those days, in the 1940s ‘talking to the world’ or ‘listening to the world’ had much more concrete and political connotations, as we will see in the following chapter. Furthermore, the fact that Turkish broadcasts were not only inspired but also partly shaped by the foreign interventions rendered the pure voice less credible.91 I have discussed above how radio news programmes were dependent on British and French sources through the Anatolian Agency. During World War II, Germany also actively designed strategies in order to affect the sources of the news in Turkish radio broadcasting.92 However, despite and against all foreign influence, Turkish Radio proudly declared itself as having ‘neutral and truthful radio journalism’ during the course of the war. Its duty was, according to the then Prime Minister Refik Saydam, ‘to tell the nation the truths, whether they are sweet or bitter; and by doing this, to be the ear of the nation and the mouth of the government’ (emphasis added).93 It is not difficult to imagine that Turkish Radio had great difficulty in dealing with the disturbing gap between the actual representation of the voice of the nation and the ideal one. The voice of the nation, in Bhabha’s terms, kept ‘stumbling over itself, its obligations and its limitations’ (1991: 95). Between what the broadcasting elite said as ‘the mouth of the government’ and heard as ‘the ear of the nation’ fell shades of atmospherics, of unpleasant and foreign voices. For example, while the Turkish broadcasters boasted about their ‘truthful’ news, the BBC openly claimed that Turkish Radio duplicated the material already broadcast by the British.94 However, as I will discuss in the next chapter, the BBC, in fact, shaped its news programmes according to the concerns of the Turks. In the following chapter, I will show the historical and dialogical interconnections between the model and the copy, which informed the representations of truth. The analysis of the BBC Turkish Service brings to light the common sky that structures both the West and the East in their supposedly distinct histories.

Sound engineers Muzaffer Haruno¤lu and Suat Osmano¤lu at work in the studio. Radyo, vol.3, no.31, 15 June 1944.

4 LONDON CALLING TURKEY: DIALOGIC YET COMPETING TRUTHS

The BBC has been associated with serious, impartial, and true news, not only in Turkey, but in most parts of the world. Especially during World War II, the BBC emerged as a significant actor, which talked to the world through its newly established foreign services and became the marker of ‘truth,’ as opposed to the deceitful fascist propaganda. In this chapter, I will question this historically established position of the BBC, specifically in reference to the case of the BBC Turkish Service. My particular aim is to convey the dialogic character of the BBC Turkish Service policies and broadcasts in relation to its constructed object, the Turkish people, primarily from 1939 until the end of the 1940s. I address the historical context and the changing strategies of the BBC Turkish Service in defining, knowing and influencing its object. However, the reactions of the constructed object can also be traced within the same material. Just as the BBC broadcasts to Turkey had an impact on Turkish Radio in its negotiations of national identity, the Turkish reactions, not always easily interpretable to the BBC, similarly intrigued the British and led to a series of problems. The answering practice of the Turkish elite to London and other foreign stations during the war demonstrates the two distinct orders of truth I have discussed above: one is the truth produced in a dialogic link with the West and articulated in discourse; the other is the intimate order of truth that reveals itself in symptoms, such as the tactics of jamming used by Turkish broadcasters, as we will see. Therefore, my analysis in this chapter does not only point to the specific role of radio broadcasting in the government of the distant masses, but also attends to the processes in which claims to truth and its justifications were made. One can see in this context the work of subtle

94

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

calculations based on information, as well as sweeping generalisations based on assumptions and anecdotal evidence. The truth, in contradiction to the rational framework within which it is usually presented, is not always based on objective knowledge, but on politics deeply infiltrated by affects. Thus, while deconstructing the discourse of truth in the BBC, I will at the same time show how it provided a basis for the order of different truths produced in Turkey. The period I study here corresponds broadly to the years of World War II. The professional practices of national and international broadcasting, which rapidly developed on the eve of World War II and continued afterwards, were central in defining a new awareness in politics, breeding on the redefined fields of knowledge, such as culture and psychology, regarded as vital for the efficiency of political strategies. The new awareness in politics emerging in the framework of broadcasting had important consequences for colonial policies, and also for nation-building ventures in the colonies and dependent countries. In Britain, for example, the creative efforts of sophisticated propaganda through radio during the war ‘swept away the last remnants of that peculiar brand of comfortable English parochialism’ (Mansell 1982: 188). Consequently, the BBC had a closer and different interest in Turkey during those years, in order to have a more direct influence on Turkey’s polices and alliances in the war. Miss Benzie from the Ministry of Information wrote to the BBC in 1940: ‘Could you give me some idea of the range of the Ankara long-wave situation? I am thinking of what games we could most usefully play with Turkey if the political situation so changed that she was willing to play!’1 On the other hand, seemingly less political and more cultural aims of the BBC Turkish Service envisaged for the postwar years were not all that innocent either. For example, the policy that was projected in 1944 for the post-war years was to produce ‘goodwill towards the British export trade’ in Turkey.2 Of course, after a few years time anticommunist propaganda was to become another declared concern. Overt political targets were never absent in the aims of the service. However, it may still be argued that the period covered here is an extraordinary one, determined by war conditions and particularly shaped by the urgent need to defeat the fierce Axis propaganda; as such, it may not be representative. While I accept that the main emphases and the organisational structure of the BBC Turkish Service differed in its war and post-war years, I find the war years especially significant to study, for two reasons: to convey (1) how culture was problematised for the objectives of propaganda, and (2) how a certain universal humanistic discourse of truth was constructed to fulfil particular national interests. These were more visibly articulated through

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

95

a network of correspondences among different British institutions — the BBC, the Ministry of Information (MOI), the War Office (WO), the Foreign Office (FO), and the British Council (BC) — during the war years, as one can find in the documents of the BBC Written Archives. The war-year strategies of the BBC also generated a significant response from the Turkish national elite and the Turkish Radio, on which I will focus. Furthermore, the logic I pursue to defend that the war period is as representative as the ‘normal’ years bears some resemblance to the one used by Zygmunt Bauman in his arguments regarding the Holocaust and modernity (1989a).3 In a similar vein, I treat the war years of the BBC in general and the BBC Turkish Service in particular as a kind of laboratory in which concepts such as impartiality and truthfulness were tested, and where hidden tendencies, strategies as well as weaknesses and failures were revealed. Interestingly, this coincides not only chronologically but also methodologically with my earlier proposition to study Turkish Radio under what may be called laboratory conditions. The Historical Context of the BBC Turkish Service There is not much of an account of the BBC World Service in the written history of the BBC.4 The information mostly comes from the memoirs of those who worked in the service. Moreover, the few existing accounts do not go much further than praising the ‘credible, effective and influential’ broadcasts of the World Service.5 The history of the BBC World Service mostly remains both invisible for and out of the scope of critical analysis. My archival research of the BBC Turkish Service contributes to filling this gap only partially and contests the taken-for-granted general statements on the World Service. When one briefly looks at the history of the World Service, one can see that it is a product of a certain transformation of Britain’s connection to the world. The BBC’s first venture into international broadcasting started with the Empire Service beamed to Australia and New Zealand in 1932. The BBC had been very cautious in stepping into international broadcasting due to fears of technical incapacity. There was a tendency to wait for the ‘perfect thing’ (Mansell 1982: 3). But the US foreign transmissions set an example and provoked ambitions that could be achieved through international radio broadcasting. Eckersley, the Chief Engineer of the BBC, talked of ‘Empire consolidation by wireless’ in that new framework. In a similar fashion, Beadle, who was at the time the BBC Station Director in Belfast after his return from South Africa, regarded communism and nascent nationalism in the empire as a grave threat to civilisation, which could be countered by

96

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

broadcasting. He claimed that broadcasting ‘is a means of intercourse which will bring about familiarity with the everyday affairs of the empire’ (Mansell 1982: 9). However, the meaning of broadcasting at that time was still narrowly conceived. The BBC had a vision of broadcasting only to the white and the British through the Empire Service: The exclusion of people of other colours is justified — at least at present — by the fact that the field of appeal of European-type programmes is substantially limited to Europeans and also by the fact that, in proportion as native populations develop an interest in broadcasting, the local service [in the colony concerned] will provide the natives with programmes of their own type.6 That very formulation was bound to be defunct after a few years time. The technology of broadcasting and broadcasting over long distances soon was associated with carrying culture to different people. This meant not only a challenge for the self-referential Biritish superiority, but also introduced new techniques of government. The relativisation of cultural issues and differences concerning target different groups through international broadcasting first led to confusion in Britain. The initial strategies of the Empire Service were on shaky grounds, caught between old traditions and fresh capacities. In Mansell’s words, ‘there was not enough hard evidence on which to base any firm conclusions. Decisions about what immediate steps to take would have to be a priori and speculative’ (Mansell 1982: 14). When the war began, radio broadcasting was raised, all of a sudden, to the status of an extremely important vehicle for propaganda. Hitler was known for his belief that ‘in war words are acts.’ He wrote in Mein Kampf that ‘our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself. Mental confusion, contradiction of feelings, panic — these are our weapons’ (cited in Mansell 1982: 55). The techniques of German propaganda, despite its harsh overtones, were quite sophisticated since they were enveloped in psychological mechanisms. One should note particularly the strategy of ‘conquering the enemy through himself,’ which was indeed a modern technique. But the British were more hesitant in reconciling the discourse of truth with the direct targets of propaganda, which led to a widening gap between declared intentions and practices. Much energy and knowledge had to be put into managing the indirect methods to achieve specific goals. While on one side the British ‘black’ radio broadcasting based on the use of deceit and fabrication continued only as a ‘fringe activity,’ in Mansell’s words (1982: 55), there was a debate concerning the possible role

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

97

of the BBC in the war. The BBC was regarded as a public service, even as art to a certain extent, but definitely not as an instrument of the state (Mansell 1982: 56). More importantly, many believed that ‘no effective propaganda policy can in the modern world be based on lies’ (Ibid). The British, as a nation, ‘regarded propaganda as suspect and were instinctively averse to the deliberate perversion of truth as a policy to be publicly adopted by Government in the pursuit of national ends’ (Mansell 1982: 56). Thus, the British embraced the policy of truth for its propaganda, instead of the lies of which the Axis propaganda made ample use. The policy of truth had wideranging effects around the world, consolidating the image of the ‘the truthful humanistic British’ during and after the war. Mansell, who himself worked in the BBC World Service, wrote retrospectively: The BBC itself, by its steadfast and consistent attachment to the truth, often against considerable pressure and in spite of the irritation it caused and the attacks it attracted, played a decisive role, not just in securing that moral victory, but in winning for Britain the gratitude and respect of those it had addressed throughout the war (Mansell 1982: 56). The image still remains with us, even in some critical assessments. Andrew Barry has referred to the BBC World Service from a different angle in his analysis of the role of free and active participation in the internal cohesion of the national and international community. He argues that ‘the function of the BBC World Service was to advance the cause of freedom and liberty not through propaganda, but by simply telling the truth, thus making it possible for individuals to judge for themselves’ (Barry 1996: 131). It is very important at this point to contextualise the strategy of ‘telling the truth’ to see how and why this performance was carried out and presented. The expansion of the international broadcasting services provides some evidence on this issue from yet another perspective. There was a sudden growth of overseas broadcasting following the outbreak of the war. Accordingly, the conception of the audience changed with ‘the new task of speaking to foreign audiences.’7 The first foreign services, apart from the Empire Service, were Latin-American and Arabic Services, followed by French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish, all founded in 1939. A year later, the BBC World Service was broadcasting in 34 languages, including some dialects. Despite the fast expansion and consolidation of the World Service, concerns within the BBC persisted. Cecil Graves, the founder of the Empire Service and a successor of Ogilvie as the general

98

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

manager, in his correspondence with the Ministry of Information, stated his concerns about the ‘risk of reprisals’; for example, the German audience may consider the BBC transmissions propaganda (Mansell 1982: 97-8). The British had to build an image that was clearly different from the German propaganda, giving it ‘very careful thought,’ in Graves’s words. Nevertheless, the opportunities that radio broadcasting could provide for the solution to colonial problems were becoming evident. The head of the African Service Grenfell Williams talked of ‘Africa being born’ and pointed to a vast untapped audience. He suggested that the experience of the people in Britain could guide the people of the colonies with similar problems (Mansell 1982: 195). This fit into the context of nationalist awakenings in the colonies and corresponded to the will of the British to influence their development. The term ‘empire’ was dropped, soon to be replaced by ‘commonwealth,’ implying a common political agenda and will for growth. In these years, the BBC monitoring service rapidly developed to keep close watch on all that was broadcast by other countries. There appeared a novel concern to know the listening habits of foreign audiences in order to better address their sensitivities. Also, the image of the BBC broadcasters was carefully tailored. For example, German Jews were not accepted to the German Service, because the BBC was anxious not to give the image that the foreign language services were ‘run by emigrés and were pursuing emigré rather than British objectives’ (Mansell 1982: 107). Thus, various concerns had to be creatively combined and presented within a consistent image. On the other hand, the much-celebrated autonomy of the BBC had to be balanced with the growing needs of government control. The Ministry of Information (MOI) was set up at the outbreak of the war with intentions to bring broadcasting under more strict control. The possible changes in the internal organisation of the BBC to this end were debated, leading to worries and tensions among the BBC members. Government control was finally institutionalised in different forms ranging from guidance to editorial supervision, but the BBC was extremely cautious not to declare its loss of autonomy to the public, holding up, at least in appearance, its independent and impartial image. The BBC Turkish Service was founded in such a context, on 20 November 1939. First, there was only a single fifteen-minute news bulletin every day, which developed over time in both length and scope. Interestingly, the Turkish Service was regarded as one of the most problematic foreign services. While there was already some accumulated knowledge — which could guide the policies for the Arabic Service, for example — the Turkish Service had to start from zero. Broadcasting to Turkey meant ‘broadcasting to a

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

99

country which was more remote from the war than the Arab states of the Middle East and with policies less close to those of Britain’ (Mansell 1982: 205). Turkey’s position was found to be more similar to the Persian case. However, the MOI still suggested in October of 1939 that the Arabic Public Relations Officer should handle the Turkish news service.8 It took a long time for the BBC to grasp the differences between the Arabic and Turkish audiences. The Turkish Service also had to address several other specific confusing cultural problems, often leading to turbulences within the department and tension with other government institutions. Debates and Strategies Propaganda For the British, the concept of propaganda was a debated issue all throughout the war. The issue was also very problematic in the Turkish Service, and it was handled together with all sorts of cultural and technical questions, such as the potential interests of the local audience, the proper use of the Turkish language, the image of the BBC broadcasters, the significant target group to be addressed, the quality of reception, and the level of penetration. Nevertheless, reliable news was regarded as a major hook for propaganda items. The Monthly Intelligence Report of the BBC Overseas Intelligence Department, in its evaluation of the situation in the Middle East in 1940, states that, while the Axis propaganda had led to suspicion among the local audiences, the British broadcasts were on the safe side: There seems no reason to fear that our policy would be the object of such suspicion. Relying upon the excellence of our news to attract a considerable number of listeners, we could confidently hope that a considerable number would continue to listen afterwards to our propaganda.9 The news constituted the main field around which propaganda was articulated. The term ‘positive propaganda’ was coined in this framework, as opposed to the ‘negative propaganda’ used by the Axis forces. The news broadcasts were designed to be heard as objective, cool and straightforward; they were not supposed to be crowded by unnecessary editorial comments, not to exaggerate the victories of the British, and not to be aggressive towards the enemy. The policy would find its legitimacy and seek its strength through the voluntary complicity of the target populations, as a result of their willingness to take their truthfulness for granted. The British innovation of pos-

100

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

itive propaganda seemed to fit well into the Turkish Service only until the signing of the Turco-German Non-aggression Pact in 1941.10 The pact disrupted the delicate balances between Britain and Turkey with the rising concern to reconsider the British policy of positive propaganda. In July of 1941, the BBC Monthly Intelligence Report touched on the issue of ‘BBC Propaganda and Policy’ and referred to a need of change: ‘It was, in fact, agreed with the Ministry of Information that arrangements should be made for “a more vigorous [propaganda] line to be taken without undue sacrifice of objectivity.”’11 On 20 August 1941, a meeting was held at the Foreign Office with the participation of the members of the FO, the MOI, and the BBC. The agenda consisted of two items: ‘1. To consider the present state of our Turkish propaganda in the light of recent disquieting developments in Turkey. 2. To decide what measures can be taken to improve our propaganda.’12 More information about Turkey was required for more vigorous propaganda. Rice from the MOI stressed in the opening of the meeting that there was not enough supply of information coming from Turkey ‘to enable them to counter German propaganda effectively and promptly.’13 Her remark was significant in pointing to the dialogic character of the produced truth. The objective truth had to be built by knowing the subjective conditions of the addressee. Professor Williams, again from the MOI, brought up a similar point: [H]itherto the most effective propaganda in Turkey had been done by the Turks themselves and it had not been considered necessary for us to set up elaborate machinery in Turkey. But the recent developments in Turkey now rendered additional machinery essential and it was most important that we should have someone energetic in Istanbul to entertain editors, organise listening groups, obtain information and report it rapidly, and promote the distribution of British films, etc.14 When Kirkpatrick from the BBC also complained that ‘the BBC were not being kept informed sufficiently,’15 it was agreed that a telegramme should be drafted to ‘Angora’ (Ankara) to enhance the flow of more information. It is important to note at this point that the seemingly rational efforts to produce more information concerning Turkey were coupled with sentiments on the British part. There was frustration as well as resentment towards the current Turkish attitude. The September Monthly Intelligence Report of 1941 covered this issue under the topic of ‘The “Ivory Tower” of Neutrality,’ with strong words against ‘the heedless Turks.’ The report blamed the Turkish people for their ‘prevalent hysteria’ and lack of ‘realism’:

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

101

[T]here can be no other country where people, at least those in government positions, have such confidence in being able to remain outside the war. The result is that, when anything happens which might threaten their complacency, the rulers of the country and the press get hysterically indignant and behave as if the German invasions of the smaller European countries during the last two years had never happened at all.16 However, despite these sentiments, the British government departments and the BBC could not afford to adopt an emotional or parochial perspective on the issue. With changes in the hegemonic imperial policy, they had learned that differences should be dealt with the utmost care. As a result, a range of strategies dwelling both on general and specific points was developed by the MOI and debated with and within the BBC. For example, the letter that Rice (MOI) wrote to Stephenson (BBC) in October of 1941 was full of new suggestions for the Turkish transmissions.17 Among them, the need for criticising enemy propaganda, thus stepping into the realm of negative propaganda was emphasised. The newly suggested perspective was also supported by a letter arriving from a representative of Edison Swan Cables Ltd. in Turkey: [A] higher note of offensive and aggressive spirit with more dynamism would be, under the circumstances, of greater propaganda value. Neutrals and nationals of young and recently awakened national life are likely to be more impressed with this kind of propaganda than with the less aggressive though more subtle in character.18 Turkey in its ‘ivory tower of neutrality’ was not a good target for subtle propaganda; given that German propaganda was now taken seriously, the truthfulness of the British news would not be taken for granted. The BBC had to advance new and more realistic strategies to have an impact on its addressee. As Bakhtin has argued in his conception of the dialogical, the BBC broadcasts had to be shaped with regard to other words about the same object and also with an anticipation of the response of the Turkish audience. Therefore, the new strategies could not be only subjective and aggressive. They were to be based on a comprehensive and rigorous analysis of several aspects. After a thorough debate about the case, the BBC sent its comments to the MOI, which then re-assessed them in a report on the problem of propaganda:

102

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

The question of the relative merits of negative as opposed to positive propaganda is not easy to establish. Nevertheless, at the moment, the following reasons seem to favour the inclusion of a certain amount of so-termed “negative” propaganda in the BBC broadcasts.19 The reasons articulated by Rice are given in a ‘scientific’ style of analysis: 1. Since we have up-to-date only met with a relatively small number of important military successes, too much positive propaganda is likely to savour of ‘boosting,’ and may fail to impress new listeners. 2. We are debarred from using anti-Axis material in our printed propaganda, and in our films, since references detrimental to our enemies are banned by the Turkish censors. We are thus only able to refer to positive propaganda in our printed and visual propaganda, and it would therefore seem desirable for the BBC to fill the gap created by Turkish censorship regulations, and devote a certain amount of space to showing up the enemy. 3. Intensive positive propaganda — which I referred to as ‘boosting’ in my memorandum should perhaps be reserved until the turn of the tide; though at present we should, of course, avail ourselves of every event and opportunity likely to keep our achievements well in the eye of the Turkish people. Nevertheless our achievements should not be unduly exaggerated, and should be combined with an aggressive spirit vis-à-vis the Axis.20 However, rational assessment was not enough. Emotional impact was also sought as manifested in the debate between the BBC and the MOI about a charismatic figure to symbolise British-ness. Rice suggested devoting ‘some space to the Royal Family [since] Hitler figures quite prominently in the German broadcasts, and ‹nönü in the Turkish.’21 The BBC’s reply was not very supportive for using the Royal Family; instead, Churchill was proposed to be such a figure. Rice opposed, arguing that Churchill should not be depicted as the equivalent of Mussolini or ‹nönü: ‘Surely to do so is not only contrary to accepted policy, but also falls in with the German picture of Churchill.’22 In all these discussions, we can see the deliberate effort to carefully delineate boundaries — for example, in shaping the image of Churchill. The task was not only to counter the current policies of Axis propaganda, but also to surpass the obstacles set up by the Turkish in the current situation, yet to impress the Turkish people by adopting a universal

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

103

image of impartiality and truthfulness and disguising the particular motivations and concerns of the British. We see that the speakers shaped their utterances from the outset, according to the envisaged needs and conditions of the addressee, yet referring to a super-addressee, namely ‘the truth,’ which has to be constantly re-adjusted and redefined in the changing circumstances. Each argument advanced by either the BBC or the MOI simultaneously interacted with each other, with the ‘enemy,’ and with the imagined addressee, in pointing to the super-addressee. In 1942, the MOI produced a more comprehensive guideline for the future transmissions of the BBC Turkish Service.23 I quote the whole report for its outstanding value in conveying the techniques of the fabrication of truth: 1. When reporting successful military operations emphasis should be given, whenever possible and in the light of official information released, to the factors of precise timing and excellent equipment. Such operations should be presented as cumulative proof of our growing strength. 2. In presenting news of the Russian war, care should be taken not to substitute in the minds of listeners — Russia for Germany as the imperialist aggressor. Accent should be on ‘continued German reverses’ rather than on ‘continued Russian victories,’ though this injunction will apply more forcibly if and when Russian troops advance beyond their own frontiers into enemy territory. 3. If occasion should demand the news-reporting of awards for heroism in any way connected with an Allied withdrawal or other reverse, care should be taken not to present such exploits in the light of attempted extenuation for the reverse. The general course of the war may be assumed to have left listeners skeptical and prejudiced in this respect. 4. News of Allied war production should always be based on official figures as and when published. The impression given should be one of solid achievement. 5. In presenting to Turkey news of neighbouring or Mediterranean countries (in itself a desirable object) meticulous accuracy must always be ensured: Turkey is clearly in an advantageous position to obtain cross-checks on such news. In particular, reports of troops movements, etc. in neighbouring countries should never be given when official confirmation is lacking. 6. Every opportunity should be taken of giving emphasis to (favourable) news tending to throw importance on Turkey’s status as a

104

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

friendly neutral. 7. The activities of Turks resident in this country may be regarded confidently as of interest to one or another section of our listeners. 8. Every opportunity should be taken of giving ‘London date-line’ reaction to major domestic events inside Turkey. 9. It is important to project the uninterrupted progress of ‘peaceful’ scientific and cultural development in this country. We should establish our lead as a ‘humanistic’ nation. 10. It is important to maintain our stand as a nation absolutely united. When leading personalities make statements or appeals on this theme, it should usually be possible — excluding unforeseen developments — to present these in the light of reiterated affirmation rather than in that of an appeal necessitated by deterioration of public opinion. Such treatment should not be allowed to exclude recognition of the fact that many other sources of news, apart from the BBC, are available to Turkey.24 Several of the techniques mentioned in the above-cited report are worthy of further attention. First, it should be noted that special emphasis is laid on factors of ‘precise timing’ and ‘excellent equipment’ to represent the ‘growing strength’ of Britain. Here, strength is operationalised in terms of scientific and technical superiority. Thereby the military contest between the forces is translated into a war between the civilised and the Others. The envisaged stance is to be supported by empirical means relying on official figures and meticulous accuracy to produce an impression of solid achievement. Yet, the empiricism involved is based more on subjective and relative factors than mere facts. For example, the differences between Russia and Germany are carefully demarcated in terms of politics, while the position of Turkey is assessed with regard to her relationship with the ‘enemy’ — that is, Germany. Meticulous accuracy is required not for its own sake, but because ‘Turkey is clearly in an advantageous position to obtain cross-checks on such news.’ Different psychological factors involved in the position of Turkey were also considered in the report. The subjective orientation towards truth finds its perfect expression in the statement concerning the representation and projection of Britain to Turkey: ‘It is important to project the uninterrupted progress of “peaceful” scientific and cultural development in this country. We should establish our lead as a “humanistic” nation’ (emphasis added). The inverted commas for the words peaceful and humanistic certainly cast a doubt on their usage, although they may have been used to accentuate the meanings of the words. They point to a constructed image

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

105

that Britain had chosen for itself and carefully and scientifically tailored in interaction with other competing forces. Therefore, ‘telling the truth’ was the name of the primary strategy for British propaganda. Yet, the listeners, especially those ‘nationals of young and recently awakened national life’ were never left alone to judge for themselves. They were given the impression of such a liberty by the employment of several techniques, which — although manufactured according to partial interests — produced an effect of objective truth. Thus, truth was produced within a certain paradigm of government, which had to be different from the German one for many reasons. The German propaganda was shaped in the framework of opposition, employing strategies of criticism, provocation, and debasement. For example, the German propaganda directed towards India was asking why Indians should die for Britain if they remained to be a subject nation (Mansell 1982: 206). Similarly, German propaganda directed towards Turkey implied that Turkish nationalism was artificially instigated by Britain.25 The German propaganda, as reported by the British Information Office in Turkey, was full of critical remarks towards the Turkish, including insults to Turks, for example, ‘about the state of their roads.’26 One should note in the light of these examples that the German strategy for propaganda aimed to produce alarm and discontent. However, the British embraced an all-encompassing hegemonic status for their propaganda, which conveyed a picture of progress and civilisation, and a solid achievement of these principles embodied by Britain. The humanitarian British nation had a claim to represent all differences — albeit rigorously manipulated — within the scope of universal humanity. This self-identity was represented in terms of cool objectivism instead of aggressiveness, and the technique of flattery was employed instead of criticism in addressing the Other. The image thus produced was highly successful, of course, also due to the outcome of the war. The British humanitarianism survived intact for many years, only to be contested recently, especially by post-colonial criticism. However, Turkey has not yet openly challenged the truth of the British broadcasting during the war. The Strategy of Flattery British propaganda efforts required a better flow of information from Turkey, even before the Turco-German Non-Aggression Pact of 1941. The strategy of telling the truth had to be substantiated by knowing the reactions of the Turkish audience to the BBC broadcasts as well as to German and other foreign broadcasts. Not only government institutions but also professionals and scholars were mobilised around this task. For example, Professor

106

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Arnold Toynbee, known for his interest in Turkey and the Middle East, was corresponding with the BBC, sending press cuttings to the Turkish Service on items of German broadcasting in Turkish and also German propaganda carried by some Turkish newspapers.27 The British Information Office in Turkey, on the other hand, was reporting the reactions of the Turkish people to the BBC programmes, mainly the news. The anecdotal nature of these reports shows that information was based more on observations than systematic research. For example, one of the reports cited the experience of a British man named Martland, who during his recent trip through Anatolia, ‘was impressed with the way Turks tuned in to London at 6:55 pm local time at every small village he stopped in.’28 The questionnaire that Lawrence from the BBC had designed aimed to generate more scientific information. The results of the survey gave the impression that ‘listeners follow all the war news with enthusiasm,’ that ‘radio listening is very extensive in Istanbul both in private hours and coffee shops,’ and that ‘the BBC is appreciated on account of the pure Turkish accent of the announcers,’ compared to nonTurkish accents of German and Italian broadcasts.29 Before 1941, when Turkey’s position changed, it was also believed that ‘Turkey is ready to accept a good deal of material from us [Britain] for use in their local broadcasting service,’ and that the newspapers were willing to publish talks broadcast by the BBC, both the home and the overseas services.30 The selfreferential superiority supported by some observations and ‘research’ could result in the belief that ‘there is therefore no need to devise means of persuading the Turks of the justice of the British cause; they take this for granted.’31 However, even in 1940, Burton from the British Information Office admitted that they had no facilities ‘for any kind of systematic listener research.’32 The positive reports supported by personal stories could lead to a feeling of success, but could not totally eradicate the feelings of puzzlement and frustration concerning the reactions of the Turkish audience. We will see that problems — such as the lack of precise information, the proper use of language or the presence of ‘atmospherics’ — were never absent from the BBC Turkish Service agenda during the war. In 1940, there was already the idea of expanding the transmissions in Turkish by introducing other types of programmes besides news. But every suggestion concerning talks, features, or music broadcasts, although initially regarded as less important and only as a supplement to the news in order to accentuate the effects of propaganda, opened up a new field of debate. The major problem was that the subjects to be covered in these programmes could not be easily reduced to propaganda. Therefore, these issues had to be problematised within the context of culture and cultural differences. I will

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

107

analyse the problems of translation in this context in the following section. I will discuss first how culture was defined as a realm of struggle. The introduction of English lessons to the Turkish Service broadcasts was one significant example where technical problems had to be translated into cultural ones. In 1940, there existed the opinion that ‘the desire to learn English is pretty general in Turkey now.’33 Yet, English lessons for the Turks were a problematic issue and generated a long-lasting discussion among the British executives. The problem of cultural standard was a difficult one. Comparisons with the Arab listeners produced more confusion. The question was whether English lessons produced for the Arabic audience would be acceptable in Turkey.34 A year later, in 1941, the BBC was still unable to answer the question. Hillelson, then Director of Near East Services to which the Turkish Service belonged, wrote to the MOI that they ‘still have to decide whether the lessons [English] should closely resemble [the ones] given in the Arabic programme.’35 The ambassador in Turkey was also involved in the debate, suggesting that English lessons should be specifically produced for Turks using Turkish names. He also suggested some names, which were not easy to transcribe for the BBC members when they had to report them to the MOI — the notes read ‘Can (Jan), J(?i)han ...’36 I contend that the newly emerging need to know more about Turkish culture — that is, cultural standards, names, and conventions — and the differences of Turkish culture from the seemingly more easily deciphered Arabic culture could also be considered in relation to changing Orientalism with the impact of broadcasting. The new conception of political intervention enabled by broadcasting, which I have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, necessitated a different kind of knowledge, the knowledge of cultural differences, as opposed to the discursive essentialisation of the Orient as the unified Other. This did not only mean being more specific about native cultures and audiences, but to be able to compare and relativise them in their interrelations as well as their relations to the centre. The BBC Internal Circulating Memo of 2 April 1940 states the problem quite clearly as it warned against the ‘impairment of the service to Arab listeners for the sake of those in Turkey.’ The report’s emphasis was: ‘A shot fired simultaneously at two targets usually hits neither.’37 1942 was the year when the debate around possible cultural strategies gained more prominence. After the Turco-German Non-Aggression Pact in 1941, the British could not rely on the prevalent Turkish attitude that ‘the most effective propaganda in Turkey had been done by the Turks themselves,’ to use Williams’s words.38 In fact, the situation was rather complex. Turkish Radio and newspapers, despite their more distanced attitude to

108

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Britain now, continued to quote extensively from British sources, including the official British war bulletin. Therefore, ‘by repeating this sort of information,’ Rice from the MOI argued, the BBC Turkish Service was perhaps not putting ‘our precious time to its most valuable use, but [is] instead duplicating material put out by the Turks, or already put out by us.’39 The vicious cycle in the duplication of news pointed to the limits of the usefulness of ‘objective facts.’ A subjective viewpoint was needed to connote British identity and distinguish it from Turkish sources, which already duplicated British news and presented them as part of the Turkish truth. Thus, Occidentalism in Turkey put the British strategy of ‘telling the truth’ into a crisis, by miming Western sources under the claim of authentic national modernity. To complicate things even further, the British were determined not to directly and officially declare their subjective viewpoint. It had to be embedded in a discursive style which would be heard as the truth by the Turkish, and while having a positive impact on their viewpoints and feelings, would mark the difference of British identity. Rice suggested as a solution ‘to say more about the Turks themselves.’ A month later, the BBC, in reference to her suggestion, quoted the argument as ‘the desirability of echoing (for flattery purposes) cultural and other local events in Turkey.’40 Hence, the name ‘flattery’ was coined as a new strategy, and culture became even more important as a realm for propaganda. It was now openly admitted that the British, including the Turkish Service and the MOI, had lacked ‘knowledge of Turkish and Turkey’ before.41 Accepted ignorance was accompanied by radical doubt: ‘Are Englishman with a firsthand knowledge of conditions in Turkey?’42 This was ‘entirely a new idea’ that the BBC had to deal with. Cultural expertise was regarded important; therefore, Lamb, who claimed to have a satisfactory knowledge of Turkey, joined the MOI. Yet, culture as a realm of propagandist strategies proved to be more difficult than it seemed, and a dispute over Turkish flattery items immediately followed. The BBC was more reserved than the MOI about the use of flattery items. According to Hillelson, the main objective was ‘to give instances of Anglo-Turkish cooperation; to mention major internal events where “reaction” from London might legitimately be expected; and to introduce flattery items with an Anglo-Turkish rather than a purely Turkish background.’43 However, Bowen from the MOI disagreed and instead argued that ‘the fact that we notice purely Turkish events should indicate in a flattering manner that we are interested in their domestic affairs.’44 The assumption was that the Turks wanted to hear more about themselves, especially through the eyes of the British, which was based on

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

109

certain psychological dynamics not very different from those that informed Occidentalism as discussed in the previous chapter. Actually, the assumption had been articulated by Rice in a more general form: ‘Foreigners’ impressions of one’s one country, though frequently weird, are invariably fascinating, and Turks are probably as amused by such accounts as most nationals.’45 But in the specific context of flattery items as propaganda, the reference to local culture had to go beyond the mere reporting of a foreigner’s impressions. The strategy of flattery in the BBC Turkish Service was to make use of local Turkish culture to be broadcast in Turkish by the Turkish presenters working in the service, while retaining its British identity. That is why the strategy was difficult to formulate and implement. Several examples of flattery items in the BBC broadcasts are special talks on Turkish national anniversaries, the transmission of the opening ceremonies of a branch of the Turkish People’s Houses in London,46 and the use of a Turkish comic character, Tombul Teyze, in a programme especially designed for the Turkish Service. They all had the aim of convincing the Turks that the British ‘look upon them as a people of integrity and distinction.’47 In order to better implement the strategy of flattery in the news programmes, Turkey was grouped with Iran, because it now seemed evident that Turkey should not be treated in the Arab context. A comparative analysis showed that by broadcasting news items of Arab origin we appeal to the legitimate interest which each Arab country takes in the affairs of the sister countries; and that it therefore becomes comparatively easy to combine ‘flattery’ values with ‘news’ values. In the case of the Turkish service the editor is bound to be more critical in regard to the appropriateness of a London dateline, in order to ensure that the object of ‘flattery’ is not defeated by presentation in an unsuitable context.48 The BBC broadcasts to Turkey and Iran had the aim of reflecting ‘a wellinformed and sympathetic knowledge of local events and personalities.’49 But the report made it clear that this was not meant to be a mere re-broadcasting of local events. The BBC had to have comprehensive information on political, economic and social developments in those countries in order to project Iran to Iran, and Turkey to Turkey. In cases where direct broadcasting of local news took place, the objective should not be ‘to give information about events but rather to flatter the audience by showing British interest in their affairs and, in the case of items of political significance, to reflect British reaction.’50 One technique for implementing the strategy of flattery

110

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

in the news was the ‘advertising technique,’51 by drawing the attention of listeners, for example, to a coming important orchestral concert in Turkey and perhaps to ‘invite them to listen to a brief gramophone extract of one of the pieces.’ Since orchestral music had been signified as something originally Western, the ‘advertising technique’ could successfully give the impression that the British already possess an original recording of a future performance in Turkey, while at the same time flattering the audience, especially the modernising elite, by supporting their efforts in cultural progress. Thus, the strategy of flattery was to show the interest of the British in Turkey by referring to a local event, yet it was also an indirect way to assert British superiority. But let us for a moment reverse positions and try to think of the impact of the strategy of flattery from the Turkish point of view. We have seen before that the Turkish elite adopted a mission, particularly using radio, to disseminate modernity through the prism of national culture and to project the Turkish people to the Turkish people. In doing so, they monopolised the criteria of quality in transmissions, which justified their position as intermediaries between East and West. Even when they broadcast samples of Western culture, such as Western Classical music, they made sure that it was projected as admissible Western-ness, as a necessary component of the national culture. Then it is not difficult to guess that the Turkish broadcasters, who projected their difference (with regard to unmediated Westernness) as the national difference, were in a position to compete with the British broadcasters investing in the strategy of flattery. In other words, the Turkish elite showed an effort to mark their own identity (or difference) in the eyes of the people as the symbol of modern Turkish-ness, while the British were developing techniques to project the modern image of the Turkish elite to Turkey, but only to mark the British difference (and identity). Therefore, a contestation between the two centres of transmission was inevitable. This can be observed in the uneasiness on the part of the Turkish elite regarding the BBC broadcasts, mutually leading to a feeling of contempt among the British authorities towards the Turkish elite. Culture, deterritorialised and re-territorialised through broadcasting, was a contested realm for both parties. Temporally redefined spatiality plays an important role in radio broadcasting, which produces an abstract space and marks that space as both universal and local within a national frame. It is universal because the radio sounds are imagined to reach everyone surpassing the boundaries, but it is also local, signifying the centre of the transmissions oriented to a particular audience. The universal becomes hegemonic only through a particular sub-

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

111

stantialisation, akin to the relation of nation and modernity I have discussed in Chapter Two. The case of the BBC was no exception to the mutual constitution of the universal and the local. The BBC employed various techniques to make sure that foreign language broadcasts, although universally humanistic in content, were heard as coming from London. Various aural signs or ‘aural iconography’ as MacKenzie (1986) defines it, were used to signify and define London; for example, the time signal of Big Ben introduced the news programmes in all foreign services. Another interesting example comes from a programme called London After Dark, beamed to the USA, which broadcast first the sirens during the air raids and then the unhurried footsteps of the crowd in the London streets ‘to convince Americans that Londoners took their air raids without excitement’ (Mansell 1982: 191). The programme London Calling Turkey was also interesting in that respect. The scene was laid in the Stamboul Restaurant in London, from where a number of Turkish guests sent brief messages to their friends in Turkey. The scene corresponded to a British reproduction of Turkish-ness in London and played an important role in the projection of Turkish-ness (mediated by London) to Turkey. The listeners in Turkey were supposed to connect to the centre (London) by hearing friendly messages from fellow Turks and feel flattered since the BBC opened such a space for them. The identity of the Turkish presenters in the BBC Turkish Service had to be managed in the same manner: Turkish in origin, but speaking from the viewpoint of the British. In practice, the Turkish presenters’ autonomy was confined to reading the translations of scripts originally written in English. Although the presenters enjoyed some freedom in live relays, normally the British editors strictly controlled their output. Furthermore, most of the policy debates took place without their knowledge and involvement. This was not unique to the Turkish Service, but was true for all foreign services. As Mansell has stated, most of the native employees in the services ‘had little awareness of what went on beyond the confines of their own service’ (1982: 94), but were still given the impression that the services primarily depended on them. The projected identity of the presenters was, therefore, a highly critical issue that needed careful trimming by the BBC. For example, a Brazilian employed in the Portuguese Service caused enormous problems in Portugal. The BBC had to learn from its mistake: ‘The sort of ridiculous thing we do! It would be much better to have a Portuguese broadcasting to Brazil than a Brazilian broadcasting to Portugal for obvious reasons.’52 The ‘obvious reasons’ were embedded in power relations dating back to colonialism. When Rice from the MOI made the suggestion that one of the senior Turkish presenters, Kartal, could write and broadcast a leading article, the

112

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

identity problem once again had to be thoroughly debated. The BBC opposed the idea, arguing that it was neither ‘practicable nor desirable’ for Kartal to write such an article. Since a leading article should ‘tell the audience what London thinks about the topic of the day, not what is thought by a Turk resident in London. It is in the latter capacity that Kartal has always been projected.’53 The comment is highly significant in that it shows the delicate boundary management. On the one hand, it was desirable to portray Kartal as independent, so as to ward off any suspicions in Turkey that he was there to say only what he was paid to say. The BBC believed that they ‘set great store by maintaining his reputation as an “independent” commentator.’54 On the other hand, he could not be allowed to speak in the name of London. He was there to deliver ‘a carefully edited report which itself reflects the tone of our official directives.’55 Paradoxically, his reputation of independence was the condition of carrying the British viewpoint. His identity could neither be purely Turkish nor British; he was a ‘Turk resident in London.’ The subtle techniques of identity/difference implemented by the BBC must have seemed too sophisticated to members of the government departments, especially under the severe wartime conditions. It was not only the MOI that had difficulties in dealing with the complex mediations of identity; the Turkish authorities also had misperceptions. The Turkish ambassador reported to the Turkish government in the fall of 1941 that the broadcasts of the BBC Turkish Service that criticised Turkey’s pact with the German forces ‘had been made without the knowledge or the approval of the BBC or the British government.’56 He thought that a ‘high degree of liberty is afforded to Kartal by the BBC.’57 The ambassador’s wrong impression was not independent of the major misconception of the ‘autonomy’ that the employees of the Turkish Service held, which was, in fact, intentionally created by the BBC and which actually meant strict supervision in practice. Kartal, taking his autonomous image too seriously, had ‘given the Ambassador an exaggerated idea of the part which he plays directing our Turkish broadcasts.’58 While the illusion of freedom reigned in both the employees of the service and the Turkish authorities, the listeners in Turkey more correctly associated the presenters in the Turkish Service with the strategies of the BBC. For example, Kartal’s father wrote a letter to his son and demanded that he return to Turkey, since his talk on the signing of the Turco-German Pact raised negative comments in Turkish society.59 The father’s understanding comes closest to reality by asking a change in Kartal’s position as a ‘Turk resident in London,’ the way it had been projected by the BBC. The debate around Kartal conveys that identity construction always occurs in a liminal space — that is, while being represented within a certain

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

113

site, it at the same time evokes the constitutive outside of the limits. This can be observed in the various misconceptions regarding the BBC Turkish service, which were actually functional in the projections of identity. It is highly interesting that Turkish authorities always regarded the Turkish people working in the BBC as potential suspects. There were attempts mediated by the Turkish ambassador to ‘handle recruitment problems in collaboration with the Turkish Government,’60 so that the Turkish Government could control the Turkish employees of the BBC. The BBC, on the other hand, was mostly successful in keeping the attempted interventions of the Turkish authorities at bay and keep up the image of independence within the service, while employing techniques of stricter control over the Turkish presenters’ output. The Turkish authorities’ mistrust of their own people, most probably informed by the mode of government that silenced any opposition in Turkey at that time, also reveals the context of their interpretation of the British policies carried out by the BBC Turkish Service. When the Turkish authorities accused the ‘Turks’ within the BBC — and not the British — of misdeeds, the Turkish government and the elite acted as if they had forgotten the enmities with the British during the National Struggle only two decades ago. It seems as if they were ready to believe in the ‘objective’ stand of the British and willingly lent themselves to the strategies of flattery.61 In the same manner, the British employed strategies of flattery by denying, at least in appearance, the sentiments rooted in recent history, for example, by broadcasting a translated message on 30 August, the anniversary of the Turkish victory against the British. However, the recalcitrant elements and the gaps within the dialogic projections, albeit being the conditions of identity construction, persisted and caused disturbances and resistance on the limits of the discourses. The Turkish elite were never happy with the BBC Turkish broadcasts and raised several criticisms. Similarly, the British authorities were frustrated due to never achieving the expected results of the painfully debated strategies in Turkey. Culture was a medium within which identities could be signified and circulated, but at the same time a realm of untranslatable differences embedded in history. The Tricks of Translation While trying to execute a well-planned use of Turkish culture in their broadcasts, the BBC editors were bounded by their own cultural conceptions, stereotypes and reactions, and consequently had difficulties in translating issues of Turkish culture. For instance, the suggestion of Rice (who always had creative ideas) to make use of the character of Tombul Teyze, a fat female figure used in Turkish comics, as a possible theme in programmes

114

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

was first considered a bright idea but soon caused feelings of disgust. Stephenson, the Assistant Director of the Near East Services, in his reply to Rice said that he regretted ‘the somewhat obscene tendency in Turkish popular periodicals.’62 Feelings of disgust were also coupled with feelings of frustration, due to the ambiguities of the feedback on programmes coming from Turkey. The BBC had always been keen on getting feedback from Turkey whenever possible, even right after the opening broadcast in 1939. Although the reactions reported through different channels were generally positive, there was persistent criticism coming from Turkey, especially on the use of language and the style of delivery in the BBC transmissions. The major problem seems to have been a problem of translation, not only on a linguistic level, but also in terms of interpreting cultural standards, values, conventions, desires and demands. The problems of translation occupied the British throughout the war years and even afterwards, despite all their efforts to learn more about Turkey. Let us look at the case of a Turkish poem suggested by the MOI to be used for the purpose of flattery, in order to better see the extent of the problem of translation. This was ‘a poem on Turkish soldiers of the IXth century’ written by Ibn al-Rumi, to be quoted should Turkey become involved in the war.63 The poem describes the ‘Turkish’ soldiers of the caliphate with phrases such as: ‘They have tongues of which the mouth never returns to health, it is as if the saliva of death kept dropping from them. They seem to be thirsty for blood, the place where they go to drink is not that by which they leave.’64 It is obvious in this example that the MOI was not able to distinguish modern Turks from those of the ninth century, notwithstanding that they would not have called themselves Turks anyway in that period. The difficulty lay with interpreting the changed context of modern Turkish identity, which was based on a selective appropriation of its historical heritage. Hillelson from the BBC opposed the MOI’s suggestion: I do not think that it is really suitable for quotation in a propagandist context. The poet does not mean to be complimentary to the Turks whom he describes as ruthless, irresistible and destructive in terms applicable to Hulagu’s Mongols and to the popular conception of Nazi Panzer troops. If the Turks fight on our side we shall do well to insist on their ‘invincibility’ but it is a far cry from the slave troops of the Abbasid Caliphate to the modern Turkish army.65 Similarly, whether ‘Attila and Tamurlane [sic]’ were Turkish national heroes needed to be discussed.66 In all of these examples, one can see the

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

115

attempts (and failures) of translation of modern Turkish-ness by the British. The use of proper Turkish was an especially difficult matter. Stephenson from the BBC argued that ‘the question of style of language to be used in translation is exceptionally difficult in Turkish, as the language is in such a state of flux.’67 This was part of a debate whether Ottoman words could be used, and if not, then what was modern Turkish? The debate also addressed the question whether the criticism coming from Turkey was due to the failure of the service or the language problem. In a meeting, with the participation of the BBC and the MOI members, language was raised as a topic. There was the idea that some of the criticism ‘reflected the different outlook of “old Turks” and “young Turks.”’68 But it was also admitted that in the Turkish Service the ‘standard of linguistic presentation and announcing was not as high as could be desired.’69 However, the members in the meeting could not come up with coherent explanations and solutions and were still perplexed about the nature and severity of criticism coming from Turkey. The criticism ranged from the use of too archaic and long sentences to alterations in meaning due to the wrong choice of words, from grammar mistakes to the bad accents of the presenters. It was even reported that several Turkish journalists had to refer to the English translations in order to understand the meaning of the broadcasts.70 The BBC was keen on solving the problem. One initial reaction to criticism was to gather more information. A questionnaire was designed for travellers from Turkey in 1942, asking whether they heard any comments ‘on the language, accent and subject-matter of BBC transmissions in Turkish.’71 But there was also the need to diagnose the reasons behind the problem. Could it be that the Turkish people, especially the publishers, were guilty because they had ‘never troubled to produce any really comprehensive dictionary.’72 It was suggested that the British officials in Ankara should send a copy of the chart of new words, issued by the Turkish Language Association. A year later, it was suggested that a small library should be installed for the use of ‘all those connected with the Turkish Service, with a view to keeping in touch with the developments in the intellectual and public life in the country.’73 In 1945, the BBC was still occupied with the language problem. Hillelson had to state the problem once more: ‘The real point, however, is whether we are dealing with occasional lapses due to the rapid pace of news translation, or with general lack of competence, and I feel that no case for the latter assumption has been established.’74 The targeted Turkish audience (of course in the representations of the Turkish elite) was never content with the quality of the BBC Turkish broadcasts. If language was one issue, another was the presenters’ style of delivery.

116

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

It was reported to the BBC that Özbekkan, a female presenter in the Turkish Service, was disliked by educated Turks because of her tendency to overstress the verbs at the end of the sentences. Rice dwelled on the problem in her report on Turkish broadcasts. She said that she was ‘more than surprised by these adverse criticisms,’ since she had ‘always admired her language and her diction.’75 However, Rice felt that she had to come up with a solution and suggested that the last sentence in the final item of the broadcast should end with a flourish. She was not sure if modern Turkish would easily lend itself to sonorous endings, but believed that ‘the effectiveness of the BBC broadcasts would be increased if they could be achieved.’76 However limited and frustrating, attempts to learn more about Turkey and its culture persisted. It is interesting and significant that a service, which was basically set up for propaganda purposes, had to busy itself with such detailed and frustrating problems of linguistic precision. The British were split between two considerations: on the one hand, to control the output as strictly as possible by limiting the participation of Turkish people in the editorial process and using primarily translated material; on the other hand, to seriously engage with the criticism in order to know better and influence the targeted audience.77 The frustration was due to the gap between the will to control and the impossibility of perfect knowledge. What made the reconciliation of power and knowledge problematic was nothing but the unknowable difference of the Other. But the impossibility of knowledge could be replaced by a certain fantasy supported by power, which blamed and denigrated the Other for being an Other — an attitude that the BBC soon adopted without much hesitation. I find it striking that the emphasis on expertise and more knowledge concerning proper Turkish language and pronunciation mostly vanished after the war. We see a certain tendency to dismiss rational solutions in that period. In 1948, for example, the BBC could assert that the main problem was not to know more about Turkey, since the problem was generated by ‘the fluidity of the Turkish Language.’78 Despite the anxiety of the British authorities to be ‘as up to date and as correct as is possible,’ the general opinion was that it was not actually possible ‘to conform to the standard of “correct Turkish” as envisaged by some critics. It seems improbable that any station outside Turkey itself could keep in day to day touch with the neologisms of the language.’79 The frustration was interpreted away by blaming the Turks for the arbitrary changes in their language. The fantasy of power on the British side produced new ways of looking, not necessarily based on empirical evidence, in order to address the problems. When neither improving knowledge (since it seemed impossible) nor

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

117

introducing radical changes — such as replacing translated material with material originally produced in Turkish (there were some attempts, but remained very limited) — were options, the problem was re-formulated. Tristram, a British official in Turkey, had already given hints of this in 1942. He had argued that it was ‘the “intellectuals” who object not only to the style and, even, grammar of our Turkish transmissions, but also to the announcers’ delivery. The less cultured man in the street appears satisfied with both style and subject matter.’80 The comforting distinction between the intellectuals and the man in the street became a guideline for solving many of the problems related to cultural translation, such as deciding the subject-matter of the talks and the kind of music to be broadcast by the Turkish Service. The guideline was efficient to the extent that it based itself on the distinction between the elite and the people already made in Turkey. However, Tristram knew that the British could not ‘disregard the views of the “intellectuals”: they run the country.’81 The BBC broadcasts had to address the ruling people if they sought any impact on national policies. On the other hand, the British were now aware that there was no easy reconciliation with the aspirations of the Turkish elite. There was a hidden competition between the two parties. The Turkish elite had to dislike the BBC transmissions if they wanted to have a distinct claim for representing Turkish modernity. They opposed the Western translation of Turkish culture since they had already translated Western modernity as a primary component of Turkish-ness, and it was a different object now: Turkish identity. Therefore, although burning with the desire to know how the Western world saw them and often happily accepting the flattery, the elite resisted fully embracing the image of modern Turkey projected by the BBC. Of course, the Turkish authorities could not oppose the Turkish transmissions directly, since they regarded them also as an approval of their existence in the government. Instead, they continuously problematised and obscured what was ‘modern’ in Turkey. This is perhaps why the Turkish ambassador had not been in favour of the decision of the Turkish Service to expand cultural items ‘to vary war news [for] some incomprehensible reason’ (emphasis mine).82 Something had to be left unspoken, in Zizek’s terms, for the Turkish reality to exist; the translation should not be re-translated. I will conclude this section on the tricks of translation with a brief discussion of the music broadcasts of the BBC Turkish Service. We have seen how music was a problematic field in Turkey in terms of its associations with modern/national identity. Given that alaturka was not well received in this context, the broadcasting of Western music seemed more suitable for the BBC Turkish Service policies. However, with the changing conjunctures

118

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

the policies had to be revised over time. The BBC increasingly gave more space to Turkish music, with the intention to appeal to the tastes of the masses as opposed to the intellectuals. In 1947, it was decided to play less Western and more Turkish music in the Turkish transmissions.83 It is not difficult to guess that this attracted further criticism from the Turkish intellectuals. They were against the image of Turkish-ness represented by what the British regarded as Turkish music. But the British could now declare the intellectuals to be snobs ‘apt to show off their education and social origin,’ arguing that ‘the standards they set are not generally acceptable.’84 Andrew Mango, who was employed by the BBC Turkish Service in 1947 (and became Service Director in 1959), has retrospectively stated that the Turkish Service gained a distinct reputation in those years by playing the kind of music that Ankara Radio banned as ‘tasteless.’85 Of course, one has to note that the war was over by then, and the desired impact on the ruling group was a lesser consideration. Therefore, the BBC could invest in populist policies by addressing the most sensitive core problem of Turkish society: the fact that Turkish people liked what the official representation of Turkish national identity repressed.86 I have argued in this section that the BBC transmissions in Turkish, particularly during the war, were shaped in a dialogical connection with socalled Turkish culture. Despite overt aims of propaganda, the BBC engaged with the intricacies of cultural translation, which were not free of uncertainties and ambiguities. The techniques and strategies for the projection of identities were implemented within this obscure and contested field. The translation of culture was strenuous. However, it would be misleading to think that with the steady accumulation of more information the BBC perfected its knowledge about Turkey. Instead, all the efforts — whether systematic or not — for more knowledge were rendered problematic, not only by the intrusion of various unexpected factors, but also by the silenced history of antagonistic interests. Then, how were certain codifications, such as the discourse of truth, consolidated and normalised? Normalisation and Representations National identities mostly gained their distinct boundaries after World War II, not only in peripheral non-Western countries or post-colonial contexts, but also in Europe. The post-war period witnessed the attempts to re-institutionalise and, with the help of new technologies of power, to governmentalise the state within national boundaries. The welfare state that aimed to govern the population in its totality and eradicate disturbing conflicts among different segments within society was one product of these processes.

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

119

The cultural field was also re-organised to become more national and hegemonic. Particularly Britain and Turkey consolidated their national identities and took their place in the newly emerging international order.87 Consequently, the dialogic character of relationships between cultures, as we have seen in the transmissions of the BBC World Service during the war, was hidden in the newly crafted monological representations of national identities. The BBC Turkish Service also adopted a more consistent definition with regard to its functions and aim in this period. This was not due to an improved state of knowledge, but a re-organisation of knowledge in a different context. Hence, I argue that the ‘truthfulness’ of the BBC emerged as a hegemonic discourse only after the war. The reasons were manifold. First, the reestablishment of the national boundaries and international order, with a new role for Britain, was an important factor. Secondly, this was accompanied by a certain loss of memory concerning past struggles within the BBC. And thirdly, the circulation of technical equipment and know-how, although not overtly charged with ideological meanings, contributed to the consolidation of identities within a hierarchical order. One of the important facts of the post-war period recognised by the British was the Turks’ desire to be accepted as part of the European world. Consequently, it was advised by the government that the Turkish Service should now become part of the European Services in the BBC World Service: Turkey now regards herself more as a European country than as an Arab country and has recently been admitted to the Council of Europe. The FO in their organisation also treat Turkey as a European country. It is therefore considered more appropriate for the Turkish Service to become part of the European Services, where it will be possible for the Service to be more effectively operated in the European environ.88 However, the BBC opposed the idea which implied separating the Turkish from the Persian Service — which were hitherto combined under one programme organiser. The Assistant Head of Eastern Services said that, although he could understand that attachment to Europe is ‘Turkish amourpropre,’ 1. From the point of view of geography Turkey is overwhelmingly Asiatic. 2. The Turkish outlook is still largely based on Eastern and Islamic and not on European and Christian tradition.

120

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

3. Linguistically, historically and, to a great degree, culturally Turkey is still to a large extent, part of the Asiatic world, e.g. the popularity of the Turkish service is largely due to its use of Oriental [Turkish] music. The Turkish language still has, and is likely to retain, very strong traces of Arabic and Persian vocabulary and ways of thought ...89 Nevertheless, due to political concerns weighing more heavily, the Turkish Service was transferred from the Eastern to the East European Services as of 18 June 1950.90 Turkey, although not essentially considered a modern European nation, was integrated into the East European Service for political reasons. Building an anti-Soviet bloc and Turkey’s position within this context played an important role in the decision. Together with the new geopolitical considerations, the British officials could now also separate political concerns from cultural evaluations. The anxiety-producing relationship with the Turkish object was replaced by neater distinctions. The field of culture, which had been problematic for political reasons at the beginning of the foreign transmissions, came to appear as if it was a relatively separate and autonomous object. The adoption of populist policies in the Turkish Service was already a sign of this. Only in this context was the disturbing contestation between the Turkish elite and the British authorities for representing modern Turkish national identity transformed into a competition for audience. This meant a normalisation of the relationship between the two parties. The normalisation of the relationship entailed codified ways of looking at each other. The British finally assumed that they knew the Turks. For example, John Mair, the Turkish Programme Organiser, in his report of 1951 evaluated the Turkish situation more freely and with less anxiety when compared to earlier ones. While he mentioned ‘the Turks’ fierce desire to be thought modern,’ he did not abstain from calling it a ‘pathological desire.’91 According to him, Turkish people were, in many ways, far from being modern. The only tradition ‘of which they are still openly proud is a military one,’ while they lacked a taste for the arts: ‘Imagination does not seem to be one of the main Turkish characteristics, and the lack of it is reflected in a low level of artistic activity.’ Consequently, he formulated the new aims of the Turkish Service as follows: ... to keep the Turkish public informed of world events, as seen from Britain, by means of an accurate and efficient news service; to help strengthen the existing friendly relations between the Turkish and British peoples; to explain and if possible secure support for British Foreign Policy, and to try and familiarise the Turkish audience with

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

121

British ways of life and thought. But to do this we obviously have to sugar the pill, and I think in general we must keep our programmes lighter, improve presentation, and relate everything possible, even to the point of exaggeration, to the Turkish outlook (emphasis added).92 Previous strategies, such as the efficiency of news and the strategy of flattery, still held their place in the new formulation. But there is one important change: the BBC could adopt a lighter attitude now, without being torn by the need to know more about modern Turkey. ‘To sugar the pill’ seemed enough. This change amounts to the fact that the BBC Turkish Service, once regarded as one of the most problematic services,93 re-wrote its own history after the war in terms of assured superiority. The past struggles that had busied the BBC and a number of government departments several years before could easily be forgotten. The celebrated autonomy of the BBC constitutes one striking example of such fabricated amnesia. When the Turkish millitary attaché in London questioned the independence of the BBC, he was assured that ... there is a safeguard against any Government attempting to use the BBC as an instrument of propaganda for its policies ... In short, the Government does not control the BBC; the Corporation acts not as a moulder of public opinion but rather as a reflector of the views and opinions of all substantial sections of the community.94 The stabilised representations guided the communication with the Turkish broadcasters within the framework of the consolidated discourse of truth.95 However, the Turkish broadcasters, who were in a situation to negotiate both the margins and the centre, retained their doubts regarding the selfrepresentation of the BBC. For example, doubt persisted about the independence of the BBC — a question that also concerned the re-structuring of the Turkish media. The planned new Turkish radio-television institution was to be based on the British model, but the Turkish broadcasters had difficulties to interpret the model of independence.96 Since they did not really believe that the BBC had been independent from the state, they came up with further questions for the BBC. The correspondences of the BBC Acting Chief Publicity Officer with the government departments on the nature of possible answers to Turkey contain elements of truth, the truth that had been repressed in the discourse of truth: ‘It is extremely difficult to persuade anybody at all outside the Commonwealth and, up to a point, the United States that the BBC is, in fact, independent.’97 It is not difficult to guess why,

122

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

when one looks back at its history! But since the new representations were solidified as social facts, Turkish broadcasters nevertheless accepted the terms of the new regime of truth. They looked upon the BBC as a model, asking about technology, know-how and training to guide their own practices in the post-war period. Interestingly, the BBC in its assured position was more hesitant to help. For example, in 1967 the BBC could advise Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) that they should not plan their output in the light of other people’s practice: ‘Broadcasting after all is a tool to help you solve your own individual or national problems of communications, and Turkey’s are obviously quite different from ours.’98 Many comments, such as these after the war, openly contradict the earlier practices of the BBC under government surveillance, which had been so keen to interfere with other national broadcasting systems. But in terms of the new codifications, there was a clear denial of the past. The new representation of British identity masked all previous attempts at propaganda and manipulation; nasty, even racist remarks that had been uttered about Turkish people had to be buried in the archives.99 Similarly, the Turkish reactions, including the Turkish ambassador’s words in 1942 about the series of talks on British Democracy in the Turkish transmissions — he had said that they were boring and unnecessary100 — were never interpreted later, either by the Turkish or the British. The BBC in the post-war period projected all failures of cultural translation as the problems of the Turkish in the established hierarchical symbolic network and claimed retrospectively that it was the Turkish who, with their ‘characteristic resistance,’101 had made things difficult for the British. The Turkish, on the other hand, built a representation of their identity on the denial of previous and present inequalities in their relationship with the British and embraced the ‘characteristic resistance’ as an un-reflected dimension of their identity.102 I will conclude this section by commenting on the supposedly neutral field of technology and know-how. The archives show that the relations between the British and the Turkish broadcasters had started even before the foundation of the Turkish Service. In 1937, Marconi wrote to the BBC to forward a request by Ankara Radio, which asked for records that the BBC no longer used.103 In the same year, Hayreddin, the director of Istanbul Radio, visited the BBC. He directed several questions to the BBC concerning the payment of copyright fees, performing right fees; methods of addressing the public and the press; regional contributions to London programmes and vice versa.104 During and after the war, Turkish requests for technology, broadcasting material and skills continued. The Turkish interest in the BBC was

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

123

not only a matter of ideological importance, but also evaluated by the British as a fertile ground for British exports to Turkey. In 1944, it was envisaged that Turkey would ‘become a big potential market for our capital goods industries. I think that a big part could be played by the BBC in drawing attention to the efficiency of British industrial scientists and designers and in impressing on the Turkish listener that Britain can and does deliver the goods.’105 Although it seems to be ordinary trade line, it is significant that goods and technology were vested with meanings which inhere in ideological constructions. I would like to cite two examples illustrative of the above point. In the first example, a radio-dealer selling English Ferranti sets in the early 1940s in Turkey reported to the BBC that people in a Turkish village were very unhappy because of the poor reception — ‘because although the sets are English, they cannot get the London station on them.’106 In another example, a group of British engineers visiting the Turkish town of Sivas purchased ‘a magnificent, spot new, Marconi 7-valve set.’ The Forces programme was ‘the most pleasant and the easiest to tune.’ With their set, they could get ‘at least three times the volume’ they normally required. And they ‘reserved “full-blast” with the windows open for “God Save the King”, “Land of Hope and Glory” and “There’ll always be an England”, just to give the locals a treat.’107 In both cases, we see the continuation of a translation activity by way of attributing identity and meanings to technological artefacts. The BBC knew well that ‘a talk on the types of machines used by the British and the meaning of their names might seem to go down well in Eastern Europe and the Levant.’108 As the familiarity with technologies grew with the advent of global capitalism after the war, the power relations within which cultural translations occurred both discursively and non-discursively became less visible and more mediated. One could say that London called Turkey in various, though not always consistent ways to which Turkey replied with a complex set of reactions. However, the dialogic nature of the relationship remained hidden in the established representations of national identities and the more routine international economic and political intercourses in the post-war period. The Dialogism of Truths We have seen that the BBC Turkish Service worked hard to implement a policy of truth during the war, which was to be identified with the humanistic British cause in the aftermath of the war. However, as can be observed in what one may call the normalisation period after the war, the codification of representations masked the previous anxieties and fantasies of the BBC

124

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Turkish Service regarding its object of knowledge. The BBC mostly relied on preformed images of Turkish-ness, and the new sources of knowledge ranged from the observations of people who visited Turkey to claimed expertise on Turkish culture, which mostly proved wrong. However, it is thought-provoking that the strategies of truth (not always based on objective knowledge) did not produce a major critical distance to the truth portrayed by the BBC.109 Fantasy and knowledge could be bridged and presented in a rational framework; they were non-contradictorily united in the assumed rational subject.110 In other words, the fantasy could unequivocally count as real within the British regime of power and truth represented by the BBC.111 In opposition to the British case, the Turkish elite could not easily produce and sustain one single truth. There were two simultaneous, yet contradictory considerations: one was to produce representations to convince the West that Turkey, too, was Western; the other was to defend the distinct identity of Turkish-ness against the West. Although in this context fantasy also played an important role, the second-order reflections due to the projections of the West by the West always evoked a lack and produced uneasiness.112 Examples pertaining to the attitudes of Turkish Radio during World War II demonstrate the uneasiness and the following splits quite clearly. Turkish authorities always emphasised that the Turkish nation presented an exemplary role in the war: a model of truth, peace and civilisation. The performance of the Turkish Radio was shown as proof. However, there was also a very pragmatic attitude to various ‘truths’ articulated by foreign radio stations. Let us look at Selim Sarper’s editorial comments in the journal Radyo in order to see how Turkey positioned itself with regard to foreign transmissions: We should be happy when the number of foreign transmissions increases: for three years we have been listening to transmissions in our language from Germany, United States, Bulgaria, Palestine, Croatia, Britain, Iran, Italy, Romania, Russia, and Syria. — Our friends should not take offence, I listed the names in alphabetical order — ... Let us admit that in the first few days we felt a little bit dizzy. How could we not be dizzy? All these major communities that we regard dear to us by remembering what they have achieved in science and fine arts to contribute to humanity and civilization, all of a sudden contradict each other in their declarations of ‘right’ and ‘truth,’ which do not accord with the measures that we know and believe in. But those three years of experience have opened our eyes ... the fact that we are in a position to recognize the real events and follow their development,

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

125

inevitably equipped us with a faculty of criticism that enables to distinguish what actually happened and how they are explained.113 The faculty of criticism mentioned by Sarper had been the very source of anxiety for the British in their propaganda efforts during the war. However, we should not think that a so-called critical attitude meant a realistic selfperception on the part of the Turkish elite. Instead, it led to demarcating the boundaries between outside and inside, and more powerfully positing the unitary inside against the heterogeneous outside. Erected against the warring foreign forces was an illusion of superiority: But there is also Ankara Radio in the world, in these three years it has also been transmitting its modest but courageous voice to the world; if they too listened to us ... The sounds that diffuse from here may be found a little strange; Ankara radio just realised a live relay of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from Ankara Conservatory to the world ... Young Turkish actors performed Antigone, the immortal play of Sophocles ... We also give news about ourselves. Those who want to know us should listen to us; our domestic news broadcasts are modest and sincere. And we give some world news to the world; we do our best to give the true news by distancing ourselves from hatred and fear.114 The arrogant and sarcastic style in the above paragraph boasting about projecting the best of (Western) culture and true world news to the world is noteworthy for simultaneously revealing a lack of confidence. The overall message supports the fantasy about identity, the exceptionalism that comes with the assertion that ‘we do not resemble anyone.’ However, the defensive logic also re-articulates the doubts about Turkey’s parroting and suggestibility. The boasting does not have much ground, given that there was a heavy infiltration of foreign news into the Turkish broadcasts, as discussed in the previous chapter. But the pragmatic attitude towards truth amidst the war of truths should also be noted here. Turkish authorities seemed to defend the right of Turkish citizens to listen to foreign radio stations, especially of those countries that contributed to humanity and civilisation. Sarper stated that ‘listening to foreign stations is not forbidden in our country.’ But the seemingly liberal stance had to be balanced by a careful negotiation of various truths, which produced a very elusive conception of truth in Turkey. Sarper’s words on the need of balancing truths when listening to foreign transmissions needs further attention:

126

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

‘You see, when we warn our citizens we do not say “don’t believe them,” we just say “be careful and alert.” I hope this much precaution will be tolerated.’ It is interesting that Sarper is apologetic to ‘them’ about the precautious Turkish attitude, which simultaneously defines an essential meaning of being a Turk against ‘them’ with reference to a Turkish sensitivity that can internally be shared, yet is not accountable to outsiders. (One can read in this attitude the characteristic resistance that frustrated the British.) Other articles published in Radyo in the same year dwelled on the same aspect: ‘Listening to [foreign] transmissions is both curious and permissible. It is curious because the Turk always liked the games of wit. It is permissible because the Turk’s comprehension is capable of understanding what does not suit the national interests, and even knowing how to interpret away the danger.’115 Turkey was presented as ‘one of the rare countries’ where ‘listening to foreign transmissions is not forbidden.’116 However, the government, while producing an illusionary atmosphere of freedom,117 simultaneously propagated warnings and thereby incited fears about the possible dangers coming from the outside. The ‘free’ but paranoid atmosphere provided a suitable medium for positioning the elite as the people who embody Turkish intelligence and know best in times of danger. The same atmosphere also provided a basis for the performance of non-discursive tactics to undermine what seemed permissible. An Ankara Radio technician has told in his memoirs how there was deliberate jamming of specific foreign transmissions.118 For example, against the dangerous impact of Italian radio on Turkish people, the solution was to make a small transmitter and place it in the Ankara radio station to produce atmospherics every night one minute before the music broadcasting on Bari Radio started: ‘We heard from people, they said they liked the music on Bari Radio, but then comes a point, it is all noise, we cannot listen to them. When I heard this, I would say, “oh, what a pity, god knows who is jamming it” with a deep joy inside.’119 Employing or allowing the tactics of jamming should not be seen only as an effort to minimise the harmful effects of propaganda. It was evident that the propaganda from both the Axis and Allied fronts could easily make their way to Turkey, especially in the form of world news.120 On the other hand, some foreign transmissions of Ankara Radio meant to be counter-propaganda were prepared by foreigners. The programmes targeting Britain, for example, were made by the British Council officials until 1945 (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 244). These examples point to the dependency of Turkey on Western powers. But given that Turkey used its negotiating powers, especially arising from its specific geo-political position during the

LONDON CALLING TURKEY

127

war, and could afford a relative independence from the West (Deringil 2004), the tactics of jamming can be interpreted as a way of relating to the so-called West. Turkey had to design its external reality according to the projected expectations of the West, as manifested in the discourse of permissibility of foreign transmissions. But the tactics of jamming was an attempt to keep a distance from that external truth and should be marked as a symptom of another, an internal order of truth, which secures the non-discursive national intimacy through the performances it evokes. The discussion of the BBC Turkish Service in this chapter has shown how the external truth in Turkey was both endorsed — that is, with the strategy of flattery — and challenged by the British problematisation of Turkish modern culture. Similarly, the internal truth, which evoked an unaccountable Turkish essence, was shaped in that very encounter. Against the assertion of the West that only the West was rational and capable of modernity, the Turkish elite responded by demonstrating that ‘their own nation was perfectly capable of replicating the Western experience’ (Gülalp 1997: 56). Yet, they adopted a pragmatic distance to this truth by constantly negotiating the warring truths. They willingly embraced the flattery of the British, but opposed it with their characteristic resistance. However, the ‘essence’ of the nation was not easy to signify, given its fluid and shifting meanings. Turkish-ness was not easy to articulate. The external form went against the essence. The belief that they could be reconciled reproduced the Occidentalist fantasy, as illustrated in the words of one of the leading elite members of the period: ‘the outfit does not kill the self ... Wearing hats did not change the Turkish head who thinks in human but also in Turkish terms; the Western culture did not destroy the Turk’s humane but Turkish feelings.’121 The elite imagined that they could mediate (that was the raison d’etre of their power) between the two orders of truth, as long as they monopolised the cultural and technological instruments. In the following two chapters, I will attend to the more deliberate forms of fantasy on radio, radio talks and drama, to analyse the complicated ways in which the social fantasy attempted to stand for reality.122

— Haven't you found a woman to marry yet? — No, I bought a radio set instead; it gives me all the gossip from the world, takes care of my health problems, entertains me with music, satisfies all my interests in various areas from sports to theatre. Furthermore, I can shut it up whenever I wish to.

Comic strip by Ramiz. Radyo, vol.2, no.14, 15 January 1943, p.23.

5 RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

In a comic strip published in the journal Radyo in 1943, we see two welldressed, most probably middle-class men in conversation: ‘Haven’t you found a woman to marry yet?’ one asks. ‘No,’ says the other, ‘I bought a radio set instead; it gives me all the gossip from the world, takes care of my health problems, entertains me with music, satisfies all my interests in various areas from sports to theatre. Furthermore, I can shut it up whenever I wish to.’1 The comic strip positions radio, which had been considered a foreign object in its initial years, naturally in everyday life. Interestingly, the familiarisation of radio in everyday life happens by both evoking and problematising the role of the ‘modern’ woman. The intended humour is produced by referring to a changing relationship, that between men and women. The idea is that women now should be companions to men, but as they become so, it may also be difficult to control them; thus, better to replace women with a technological artefact. I suggest that there are two simultaneous meanings produced by this comic strip. If one is the pedagogical message that radio can be controlled— and its growing impact should thus not be regarded as threatening for national culture — the other is that radio belongs to a feminine world. The woman as a metaphor here familiarises but at the same inevitably feminises radio. It reveals that radio broadcasting provided new tools for the government of familial subjects, and family and everyday life became targets of the new power regime in Turkey. In this chapter, I will dwell on radio talks, which mostly addressed the family by talking to men and women with an aim of redefining and reforming gender relations. I also claim that these radio talks provided a significant medium to those who talked on the radio, namely the elite, for distinguishing nature and culture in gendered terms, so as to manage the boundaries of Western civilisation and national culture. Scholars who have studied nationalism from a feminist perspective have argued that women signify the so-called natural

130

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

distinctiveness of the nation. While men stand in a metonymic relationship to the nation — that is, by being ‘contiguous with each other and with the national whole’ — women, in contrast, appear in a metaphoric role (Boehmer cited in McClintock 1997: 90). The symbolic role of women is derived from their positioning in the family as both ‘biological reproducers of the members of national collectivities,’ and ‘active transmitters and producers of national culture’ (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989: 7). However, as McClintock has succinctly observed, family is caught in a paradox in the modern nation. On the one hand, family as a natural metaphor, which sanctions the organic unity of the nation, constructs a historical genesis narrative; on the other hand, family is deprived of its history as it is relegated to the natural realm of intimacy, as opposed to the public field of economics and politics (1997: 92). Consequently, national progress could only be rendered in familial terms, yet family figured beyond history (McClintock 1997: 93). The paradox is not paralysing, though; on the contrary, it constructs new subject positions for the performance of men and women within the modern national paradigm. Similarly, the Turkish elite (mostly men, but also a number of women) performed as political subjects shaped by the gendered signification of the nation. Through the metaphor of women, the nation was designated as an organic unity distinct from Western civilisation, but at the same time, the modern (and Western) conception of progress was evoked as a way of catching up with Western civilisation through changes in the family entrusted to women. Occidental fantasy was gendered in bridging the essence and the artificial, the empirical bodies and the ideal, as well as the different regimes of truth. It was mostly men who considered themselves ‘experts’ in various fields, including pedagogy and health, who delivered the radio talks which I will discuss here. The education of children, family life, the role of women, sports, love, discipline and leisure activities were among the wide range of subjects targeting the family through radio. Yet, there are certain recurring themes. These themes I choose to discuss — namely, the family and men, the woman, the child, youth and joy, and the body — demonstrate how the national (male) elite imagined and positioned themselves as active agents within the modern nation, and how they addressed the core issues of making the modern nation through a complex mediation, by utilising certain naturalised tropes. The elite appear in these talks as ‘modern’ authorities as opposed to traditional sources of knowledge and discipline. Interestingly, the very medium of the radio talk was regarded as representative of the modern/national and ‘scientific’ pedagogy. The immediacy and directness of the format of

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

131

radio talks appealed to many intellectuals of the period, who were allotted air time on Ankara Radio, especially after its nationalisation in 1936. However, the talking elites preconceived the audience as the whole nation, without any knowledge about their conditions and interests. The ways in which these ‘experts’ imagined that, by talking on the radio, they could actually make reality, or, in other words, the lack of knowledge concerning the addressee, point to the limits of their pedagogical authority. We will see that the elite once in a while distanced themselves from the authority position and entertained phantasmatic ideas of immortality, endless youth and joy. The talking authorities became almost childish and performed as adolescent young men in their dreams and language games to fulfil the wish of a modern nation within which they desired to be omnipotent subjects. This position alludes to the symbolic fiction of the nation, but retains, within itself, the pre-linguistic immediate and pure enjoyment — not always making meanings, but sometimes playing with words, as a child will play with objects of pleasure, as we will see in some of the talks. I contend that the fantasy of omnipotence could be interpreted within the feminisation of modern culture through radio broadcasting. The realm of the everyday was defined and posed as governable through the metaphor of woman that also positioned radio as a familiar yet new and modern object in everyday life. However, the Occidentalist disavowal of reality — namely, the avoidance to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the everyday — posited the disembodied and purified ideal as opposed to the threatening modern culture as feminine. This resonates with Andreas Huyssen’s argument that mass culture in modernity has been feminised: ‘the fear of the masses in this age of declining liberalism is always a fear of a woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass’ (1986: 52). I will argue that the feminisation of culture was both the product and the driving force of the radio talks on Turkish Radio. Therefore, the visited themes in these talks do not just point to issues of disciplining the nation, but also evoke the idealized mediating concepts or ‘operators’ (Strathern 1995a) of Occidentalist fantasy. The woman, the child and youth/joy as mediating concepts were employed to ground the contradicting ideals and reality, hence are important for analysing the dynamics of projection in which the elite were involved in order to fix the supposed yet fragile origins, unity and superiority of the nation. These mediators also instrumentalise certain images of civilisation in a matrix of nature and culture. However, here the distinction between nature and culture figures differently than what is regarded as Western ‘conventional symbolisation,’ in

132

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Strathern’s terms (1995a). Occidentalism, I argue, accounts for the difference, as I will discuss in the concluding section of this chapter. If in the Western matrix the change in culture is stabilised and justified by nature, my analysis will show that in Turkey both nature and culture have been problematised through the projected gaze of Western civilisation. ‘Nature’ could not simply provide a priori — a taken-for-granted antidote for harmonising the ‘artificial’ modern (Western) culture. Nature itself appears as an already unstable trope, already stigmatized as inferior by Orientalism. Then, phantasmatic idioms, such as immortality, in the talks may be read as means of distancing oneself from both inferior nature and threatening culture. The Radio Talks The nationalisation of Turkish Radio was accompanied by alarmed concerns for transforming radio so that it would not be solely a ‘music box.’ Earlier, the so-called ‘verbal programmes’ ranked low in comparison to music broadcasts,2 and they were to increase significantly after radio was put under state control.3 Starting from 1935, new types of verbal programmes as well as new topics were introduced. For example, weekly news programmes now accompanied the broadcasting of daily news reports (for long years ignored by the broadcasters).4 There were language programmes teaching foreign languages (German and French), and programmes to promote certain institutions such the Red Crescent and the State Monopolies Department. There were also radio drama, dramatized sketches, children’s and peasants’ programmes, together with what can be defined as radio talks. Radio talks were mostly delivered by a single person and covered a variety of topics ranging from science and technology to art and literature, from economics to legal issues, and from health to family, directly addressing the audience. With these new programmes, radio was transformed from a music box into a box that talked. The assumed immediacy of speech was associated with the educating and disciplining roles of radio. The director of Ankara Radio, Vedat Nedim Tör, at the beginning of the 1940s stated that the mission of radio talks should be ‘to give the best examples of Turkish language in terms of both pronunciation and delivery’; ‘to disseminate positive and helpful information in an entertaining way — avoiding snobbery; to have educational influence on people, while avoiding subjects that can be harmful for the moral health and the tastes of the youth and the people’; and ‘to raise the level of artistic appreciation’ (cited in Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 223). These principles showed the determination of the broadcasters to regulate the content and the form of the ‘verbal programmes,’ which before had been few in number and not regularly broadcast.

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

133

The transformation of radio’s mission and its definition through talking inevitably brought into focus the question of audience. The words of a prominent Kemalist journalist, Nadir Nadi, were significant in relation to this question: ‘Whom are we going to inform? Whom are we going to entertain?’5 The question was answered in different ways. Baltac›o¤lu insisted that radio had to be transformed into a people’s university, with 70 percent of its programmes allotted to courses such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, geography, the history of the Turkish Revolution, child education, health, agriculture and theatre. Most members of the elite agreed that the radio had to address the people, particularly the people in the towns and villages, with specific emphasis on children’s education. The radio, it was argued, had spoken in the past mostly to the rich people in the big cities.6 This had to change if the new mission of discipline and education was going to be fulfilled. The questionnaire of the newspaper Cumhuriyet on the same issue raised similar concerns from the readers.7 The new need to address the people was conceived as a problem of both content and form. Radio talks and radio drama were regarded as forms that had special educational value. It’s significant that discussions around the audience in these years were confined to what the elite had to do; for example, how they had to make the talks more interesting and higher in educational value. The question of what the people may have wanted or needed remained mostly absent from the discussions. Muzaffer fierif’s argument for a more scientific diagnosis of audience reception when designing programmes remained marginal. In an article on the social psychology of radio, fierif said that the people is not an empty gramophone disc to be recorded on; it is not a passive machine that absorbs ... it has its own tastes, own conception of life. These have an impact, therefore, on how the people receive the incoming effects and consequently how it reacts to them. This is why it is not enough just to address the people in transmissions. It is also necessary to scientifically and seriously investigate how people receive these messages, where they positively react or where they do not react at all; and one should take these results into consideration when designing programmes.8 But the intellectuals who actually delivered the radio talks thought differently. They were mostly convinced that it was really the style that mattered, and the successful popularisation of certain subjects made the talks accessible to a larger audience. Therefore, issues regarding the use of language were

134

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

more central to the debates on radio talks than audience reception.9 The audience, despite fierif’s warnings, was posited as a passive entity. Thus, the active agency of the elite was prioritised, and the talking subject mediated the ideals of the regime and the passive object, the people, without really knowing who was listening. But the very form of the radio talk curiously stands in tension with the assumption of a generalised audience. Radio talks are usually designed to be part of everyday life. The daily nature of broadcast talks, which constitute the ‘background and foreground of our everyday dealings with each other in a common world’ (Scannell 1996: 5), clashed in the case of Turkish Radio with the inscription of another world that stood above the ordinary people. The simple and chatty style of radio talks on Turkish Radio were blended with authoritative inserts, mostly informed by Western pedagogy which aimed to teach the audience what was good, modern and desirable. The ordinariness of the talk was disrupted by the insertion of foreign examples and names. Thus, the talks that aimed to be natural and popular were inevitably trapped in an artificial world.10 The spatiality of radio talks was especially problematic. Spatiality raises the issue of direction. ‘It asks, towards whom do programmes point?’ (Scannell 1996: 11) What Scannell calls the normalisation of output in broadcasting requires a conception of an audience in a separate space. Scannell has argued that a ‘growing sense of talking into the void contributed, in the BBC, to the creation of listener research to answer such basic questions as who is out there listening, when can they listen and do they like what they hear?’ (1996: 11). In the case of Turkish Radio, however, not only the listening habits but also the reactions of the audience were absent from the meaning of the talks. However, a sense of talking to the void did not lead the Turkish elite to know more about their target; instead, the disturbing void was projected back to the talk itself, problematising its style, its form and content. It was the talking subject who had to develop himself in order to reach an idealised form of speech. The spatiality of the talks was denied and replaced with an idealised space of the nation that was signified by the radio voices. Thus, the communicational model of talking and listening was fractured. The subject who talked without hearing at the same time embodied the object: the nation. The elite had to learn how to embody the nation in an ideal form of speech. This latter aspect indicates that the mission of radio talks for disciplining and educating the people actually meant the selfdisciplining of the elite, which also shaped their political subjectivity.

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

135

The Language, the Body and the Nation In this section, I will look more closely at several radio talks that were regularly featured for certain periods on Turkish Radio, from the 1930s to the mid-1940s. I will refer here to talks delivered by Selim S›rr›, Kaz›m Nami Duru, Dr. Behçet Kamay, Dr. Galip Ataç, and Dr. Celal Ertu¤.11 These talks do not only share similar tropes of educating the nation, but they also employ similar strategies for securing an authoritative voice. What makes these talks significant for my analysis, as I have noted above, is the everyday nature in their subject-matter, as opposed to the rhetorical and more abstract talks on history or economy. These talks on daily subjects were ideally addressed to the so-called ordinary people in their domestic settings. They talk to the family, both men and women, and sometimes also to children. First, I will briefly introduce two prominent figures who talked on the radio, Selim S›rr› and Galip Ataç, with the purpose of showing how radio talks connected to other practices and discourses of the period. Selim S›rr› gave talks on Istanbul Radio starting in the early 1930s. These were, according to Koçabaflo¤lu, exemplary of what was regarded as ‘talks of educational value’ (1980: 99). They were easy to understand and employed a language that was ‘suitable for microphone’ (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 99). Selim S›rr› was a late Ottoman intellectual, a Young Turk, who had discovered the importance of national culture, especially of folk dances, at the beginning of the twentieth century in Stockholm, where he studied physical education after he had received a degree in engineering. Impressed by the studies on folk culture in Sweden, he became very much interested in researching Turkish folklore and folk dances, an interest that continued after the foundation of the Turkish Republic. His main contribution to the re-appropriation of folk culture in Turkey was the idea of adapting the zeybek (an Aegean folk dance) to the salon life in modern cities, hence transforming it into a modern national dance. His emphasis was to give the dance a ‘civilised’ and refined character with the inclusion of women.12 Selim S›rr›’s interest in folk dance and physical education as necessary elements of national culture set the framework and the tone of his radio talks. If Selim S›rr› was interested in disciplining the body, Galip Ataç attended to the body as an expert on health. He was a medical doctor and worked as the General Director of the Haydarpafla Emraz-› ‹ntaniye Hospital. His talks on Ankara Radio starting in 1940 were presented under the name Home’s Hour. It was a programme that touched on various subjects of everyday life, not only those interesting to women, but the whole family, in an entertaining and simple style (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 238). In 1941, when the pro-

136

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

gramme first started, he lived in Istanbul as a practicing medical doctor and sent his talks by mail to be read on Ankara Radio. But a year later he had to move to Ankara and was recruited by Ankara Radio as a member of its staff.13 His talks were very popular, although he never read them himself. The reason for the popularity, according to the director of Ankara Radio, Vedat Nedim Tör, was due to his ‘mastery of the technique for writing for radio.’ His talks did not address only a small group, but was equally interesting for ‘young girls and boys, mature and old people, the illiterate and intellectuals, officials and other professionals.’14 Tör introduced the concept of vulgarisation (a term used by Westerners, he noted) to account for the success of his talks. This meant treating a subject in a way so that it becomes accessible to all. Tör added that, in order to achieve vulgarisation, one had to have a ‘universal culture.’ 15 In an interview with the presenter of his talks, Ataç also mentioned his concern for catering to different tastes and interests in the talks he wrote. Yet, according to him, it was not easy to please everyone: When the talk ends, the telephone calls start. The listeners, calling one after the other, tell me their opinions on the talk broadcast that day. Some are critical; others praise it. Some even threaten me. Sometimes people left their work to come and talk to me in the hospital where I work. I already knew how difficult it would be to please people from different levels of culture with different styles of life. But after I started producing for radio I realised it more. If you compliment plumpness in a talk, the slim women will feel susceptible; if you compliment dark complexions the fair ones will be upset ... 16 Ataç’s account conveys some important points that shed light on the circumstances of production and reception of radio talks. The technique of vulgarisation was regarded as a necessary condition for reaching the people. The talking person had to deal with the level of the audience. However, he also stood above them, since the technique required a universal culture, which was synonymous in this case with Western culture. This is telling about the kind of authority envisaged for and implemented through radio talks. Ataç had a fatherly attitude, said Tör, which attended to the needs of the public in an understanding way, avoiding snobbery. Yet, Ataç emerged as an authority figure by dint of his vast knowledge on various topics. He knew everything, from haircare to childcare. In his talks, the issues of everyday life were reprocessed in the light of a new scientific knowledge that was informed by civilisation. The other important point in Ataç’s account concerns reception. We see

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

137

that the abstract concept of the people as audience in practice meant people living either in Istanbul or Ankara, who could telephone or visit Ataç, or a few who could write to him. Ataç was actually quite sarcastic about the letters he received, mocking the trivial questions in them.17 This sarcastic attitude, which also determined the tone of his talks, once again points to the unbridgeable gap between the ideal and the actual. The notion of the people that justified the elite’s agency bore in itself a denigration of the ordinary people whenever they expressed themselves. In fact, the triviality mocked in the audience reactions was no different than the triviality of the topics on which Ataç wrote for his radio talks. The technique of vulgarisation resulted in the feminisation (and infantilisation) of culture. When compared in terms of their attitude towards the body, the talks of Selim S›rr› and Galip Ataç were, in fact, complimenting each other. Selim S›rr› grounded his talks in the ideal, which, in turn, provided him with a language for disciplining the bodies. Ataç took the triviality of bodies as a starting point and arrived at a sarcastic, quasi-scientific discourse about them. In both of them, the body was posited as the site of nation-building. If the former is an example of the embodiment of the ideal, the latter entails the disembodiment of the actual, both of which were made possible by the technological voice of the radio. Selim S›rr›’s attitude that glorified the ideal seems to fall within, what Zizek calls, a totalitarian framework of authority.18 On the other hand, Ataç preserved and expressed a distance towards the ideal in his cynical attitude (also by not reading his talks himself). His distanced attitude put the symbolic fiction of the people in question. The actual audience which he despised stood in contradiction to the idealised image of the audience. Yet, what was never put into question in Ataç’s talks was the assumption that the elite was made of ‘special stuff’ (Zizek 1996: 252), since they had access to universal or Western culture. We could say that the political subjectivity in the Occidentalist framework oscillated between a serious faith in the national ideal and a sarcastic distanced attitude towards it. The political subject attempted to curb his lack of faith in the ideal, but paradoxically found pleasure in mocking the existing potential of the ideal. It is no surprise, then, that glorification and vulgarisation were strategies simultaneously employed in the radio talks. The resulting authoritative voice on radio nurtured the fantasy of the subject as omnipotent while it presented itself as pedagogical; in other words, the talking subject at the same time educated and mocked the people. Although regarded as fatherly at that time, I contend that the authoritative voice on radio comes closer to a kind of maternal authority that attends to the bodies and all the ‘trivial’ topics associated with it.19 Yet, maternal authority should not be thought of as if

138

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

directly springing from the consciousness of the elite as already formed subjects; instead, it resides in the voice that hovers in that interspace between the talking subject and the people, with a certain effect on both those who talk and those who listen. As I will show later in this chapter, talking on the radio was fantasised as encompassing and transforming all conflicts, all divisions and splits of both the talking subject and the fictive object. I suggest that the radio voice, as the ‘ideal mother,’ is one significant aspect that helps us to position the elite in regard to the radio talks. Let us now turn to the recurring themes in the talks. The Family and Men The nuclear family was promoted in several talks in opposition to the traditional forms of the extended family. Consequently, the roles of women and men were redefined through radio talks. Both masculinity and femininity became objects of sentimental education in the framework of the family. While the role of the new women were put in more ambivalent terms, to be discussed in the following section, the tasks awaiting the new men were set more clearly. Selim S›rr› reminded men that the age of the dictatorship of the father was over. In the old times, men were absent in the intimate sphere, leaving many duties such as childcare to women; ‘children could put their demands to their father only through the mediation of the mother’ (1932: 212). Even Montaigne had objected to such a position of men (211). Now this had to change. Another figure of authority on radio, Kaz›m Nami Duru also portrayed and criticised the ‘classical’ father. He said that men who typically were engaged in outside homosocial activities, such as playing cards after work, had to resume their family responsibilities. The new family should be based not only on respect but also love among its members.20 According to Duru, both men and women had duties in the family, which were grounded in love in marriage, but which were also directly connected to the nation. While women ‘naturally’ had more compassion for their children and men lacked it, men still had to educate themselves to be good fathers, since only they could guide the children in social education. ‘We,’ said Duru, ‘lack the art of fatherhood’ (43). A good father was one, ‘who valued the child more than himself; who wanted the child to be better than himself; and who learned what his duties were for this end and fulfilled them’ (Duru 1937: 8, emphasis added). In the same manner, the good mother had to learn to combine her ‘instinctual motherly love’ with ‘the virtues of social motherhood.’ Duru continued that the ‘health of the nation’ rises upon the health of the family. The normative and moral regulation of gender(s) within the family focused

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

139

on the child as a ‘national asset’ (9), which was significantly a modern conception. The same theme of the national family rebounds in Galip Ataç’s talks: ‘What we call the people is made up of families. If we compare the people to an organism, families are the cells’ (1943: 52). However, Turkish society was problematised in this very respect. According to Duru, for example, Turkish people had not yet developed a notion of ‘scientific and civilised’ family (44). The Turkish family was lacking when seen through the projected viewpoint of the Western gaze. The conception of Turkish family as standing in the interstices of nature and culture and in need of civilisation for development seems to invoke the modern dichotomy of traditional and modern, but actually goes beyond it, since nationalism was regarded as the site of both redefining nature and culture to make the modern.21 The anxiety provoked by the lack of the Turkish family was functional for regulating masculinity. As Judith Surkis has argued in a different context in nineteenth-century France, the conjugal family was a metaphor that provided the very source of the social integration of men (2006: 1), and the ‘risk of social and sexual deviance’ was integral to the governing of masculinity (2006: 12). Similarly, the need to reform the Turkish family was at the same time the need to reform men’s sexuality against the risks of social and sexual deviance. In this respect, I find it significant that not only motherhood but also fatherhood became targets of national discipline in radio talks. Although the social construction of womanhood and, consequently, motherhood in relation to nation and modernity attracted attention from many scholars in Turkey and elsewhere (Akflit 2005; Davin 1997; Durakbafla and ‹lyaso¤lu 2001; Kandiyoti 1989, 1991, 1993; Najmabadi 1998, Sirman 2005),22 the education of masculinity generally remains a less studied domain, and more so in non-Western contexts. In modern Turkey, especially the traditional practices of manhood were problematised with regard to the West.23 Deniz Kandiyoti has argued that ‘we have to entertain the possibility that defining responsible social adulthood in terms of monogamous heterosexuality may not only have been a matter of proscribing co-wives, concubines, and child brides but may also have been about taming other, unruly forms of male sexuality’ (1998: 280). The segregation of women and men and, consequently, of the public and the private were to be re-organised and socially integrated in the ideal civilised national life. The first thing to be attended to this end was correcting the indulgent sexual behaviour of men, orienting and re-educating them for family life. The child was considered to be the utmost mediator for setting up an order of the modern/national family, in which a man and a woman would love each other. A man who took care of his children would finally stand up

140

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

together with the woman in the family and attach himself to the civilised national ideal. Thus, the idea of marriage had to be made attractive for men. ‘If to get married is a necessary and desirable need, to continue the marriage is a necessity that cannot be devalued in any way,’ said Ertu¤ in a radio talk (1945: 29). The defensive attitude here should be noted. In the Turkish family (the re-invented tradition against the Ottoman family), ‘the proud, influential man cares for his wife and for the children as his honour, and attends to their needs with all his effort’ (Ibid). But this does not mean ‘a henpecked husband,’ added Ertu¤, something that had been a fearful label for men in Ottoman society. He wanted to convince the audience that the new man was not less powerful, but differently empowered by civilisation. Furthermore, the comments on love in radio talks stand out as a significant trope for educating and civilising the desire of men within the family. For example, Ertu¤, who often introduced psychological explanations for family issues in his Sunday Chats, addressed the question of ‘what is love?’ in one of his talks. He said that love is not only a ‘powerful impression’ on us, but that it is also formed through ‘hard and difficult barriers.’ He contrasted the love for the nation with erotic love (1945: 56). The latter did not exactly correspond to love in marriage, because marriage also entailed duty. ‘What else could the lovers in a matrimonial union think but the order in their lives?’ (57) Therefore, love in marriage was to be solidified, not by a desire for ‘unattainable objects’ (a desire expressed in Ottoman poems as a blend of transcendental and homoerotic love), but only by a love that can be harmonised within national order and coherence. The two different words for love in Turkish — aflk and sevgi24 — allowed him to set the latter as a realm of regulation and correction. The expert knowledge of the doctor and the speaker on the radio had a say on the domestication of men’s desire. If there were any problems in marriage, Ertu¤ said, then doctors should intervene and suggest forms of ‘therapy’ (1945: 32). Galip Ataç, in his more idiosyncratic formulations, provided another scientific framework to argue that love between man and wife was the most developed form of love. In fact, he agreed with Ertu¤ that love in marriage could not be ‘big love’ (with implications of passionate erotic love); however, against those who believed that ‘marriage is a social institution where there is no place for love,’ he claimed that love in the conjugal union was possible. He gave examples from the animal world to illustrate how the social institution of marriage functioned according to natural laws. In this and other radio talks that attempted to turn marriage into a desired option for men and that redefined love in this context, he made ample references to

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

141

Western scientific sources. While Selim S›rr› cited Western philosophers, Galip Ataç introduced biological facts, such as hormones. For example, he referred to the role of hormones in men, which due to their ‘complexities’ may cause problems in a marriage. Thus, if men tended to have extramarital relations, their hormones should be blamed (1943: 94-100). Ertu¤, on the other hand, referred to Western psychology, including Freud’s psychoanalysis. He argued against the extended family by employing the concept of the unconscious to account for the typical feuds among mothers-in-law and brides, which, according to him, were nothing but competition for the same man in the family. However, the civilising mission of radio that targeted men in a scientific discourse had its limits. It is highly significant that the changes that men had to undergo were essentially associated with the stable figure of the woman. In other words, women who just had to integrate the social and national duties to their already positive sacrificial, compassionate, giving roles were entrusted with the duty to oversee the men’s changes. ‘If women did her best at home, took care of its cleanliness and order, and trusted, supported and motivated her husband in his efforts, then why should a man go astray?’ asked Ertu¤ (1945: 37). The man was put under woman’s supervision in his due transformation. Hence, the negotiations concerning men’s roles were made more realistic by redefining yet reaffirming men’s power over women whose burden increased in the new regime. On top of their ‘natural’ duties at home, women’s new mission in the national/modern regime included taking care of their husbands’ subjectivity and morality.25 The Woman The so-called ‘woman problem’ was the most complex issue addressed in the radio talks. We see a number of twists in handling this sensitive issue. On the one hand, women were considered the source of light, hence the guarantors of civilisation, for example, in Selim S›rr›’s argument that women should take place in public life, thereby correcting the ills of the past regime.26 Women, on the other hand, were vested with ‘essential’ duties, the most important one being motherhood. Selim S›rr› made it very clear: ‘Women cannot rid themselves of the duty and responsibility of motherhood’ (270). The two aspects, the enlightening role of women and their eternal duties, had to be delicately mediated and balanced. It is not mere coincidence then that Selim S›rr› referred to the image of the ‘double-edged sword of civilisation’ when talking about women: ‘One should not forget that the arms of civilisation have double sharp edges; using them is subject to knowledge. Otherwise they cut one’s hands’ (1932: 142). It is also signif-

142

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

icant that Selim S›rr›, who had preached the desirability of Western life styles in many areas, was cautious on the issue of women’s public activities: ‘The worst thing in the world is to blindly imitate others. “American women do this, British girls do that, so why not do these things? What is our difference from them?” I totally disagree with this claim’ (145). Thus, women were placed in a liminal zone of (Western) civilisation. Women were simultaneously regarded as both a crucial sign for change and as the most stable element in the society. A woman had to change without actually changing her primary duties and roles. She had to show the world the ‘original’ civilised state of the Turkish nation through her new appearance,27 but she also had to be altruistic, in Selim S›rr›’s words, willing to give up and sacrifice her individual ambitions. Selim S›rr›, in his talk entitled ‘Women in the Twentieth Century,’ devalued the ideas of European feminists and warned Turkish women against the dangers of ‘becoming like a man.’ He believed that women’s competing with men was detrimental to national life. Furthermore, if Turkish women became feminists, they would not value any man as attractive for marriage (266). However, Selim S›rr› also defended the education of girls. This was necessary for them to be good mothers and educators. In connection to this role, he praised womanhood: ‘Woman is like a sun which warms, illuminates and makes life’ (271). The woman was simultaneously a threatening and a glorified figure. The delicate balance that had to be maintained made the discourse on women variable and fluid. For example, the boundary between the private and the public was not a simple line dividing motherhood and the public activities of women. The boundary was constantly problematised and redrawn by the male elite within the national project. The private duties of women usually were vested with meanings that transcended the private domain. For example, women as mothers were treated almost like a collective political subject and ascribed the national duty of accomplishing Turkish motherhood. ‘Unite Turkish Mothers!’ said Duru in one of his radio talks (1937: 31). The target set by Duru was to bring together not only a few, but all mothers within a uniform body so that Turkey could take the position it deserved in the face of humanity. The love of united mothers could create a ‘Turkish society without class divisions’ and become a sacred force to which ‘the whole world bows’ (Ibid). But the idea of mobilising mothers for political ends was not practically elaborated. Although once in a while the People’s Houses were considered a place for mothers’ meetings, the idea remained vague and mostly symbolic. Yet, it shows that, compared to men who were liable to go astray ‘because of their hormones,’ women were imagined to provide a much more stable ground for the signification of the

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

143

nation. While the private meanings of motherhood were extended to the nation, the public duties of women were fashioned after the model of motherhood. For example, women were regarded as suitable for positions such as schoolteachers and nurses in public life, since they had the ‘instinct’ for compassion and care. The ‘real’ woman, in Ertu¤’s words, was a woman whose individual emotions would come after her sacred missions at home (1945: 37). In other words, a woman was expected to deny her individual self. It is possible to argue that women did not even figure as objects of desire within this discourse, let alone being subjects. Women were disembodied and only existed as an idea. Her individuality, sexuality and emotions were erased. Therefore, it is not surprising that sexuality, especially the sexual desire of women, was never mentioned in the radio talks. Ataç, who was so keen on biological scientific explanations, referred to women’s hormones only once: ‘You may ask what happens when women’s hormones are too complex. In that case, the light of love between the wife and husband dies. But this is another story’ (1943: 99). Yet, the story remained untold in radio talks,and generally elsewhere in that period, except for some women writers’ texts.28 Thus, women were denied the status of active subjects and did not even figure as objects of desire in the pedagogic talks of the elite. Ertu¤ made this clear when he advised men not to ask for exaggerated dreams about marriage; instead, men should realistically look for ‘modest, clean but sacred homes’ (1945: 54). Women were stripped of their sexuality and incorporated into an abstract idea that represented family, modernity and the nation, which guarded men against the dangers of immorality of either traditionalism or too much Westernism. Even motherhood was not handled as an individual experience, but instead was focused on the child as a national asset. The debates on breastfeeding, the socialisation and education of children were all circumscribed by national concerns. Nevertheless, most of the radio talks addressed ‘feminine’ issues such as haircare, a beautiful complexion and similar ‘ordinary’ problems in the feminine domestic sphere. Thus, femininity was vulgarised to fit into the everyday nature of the talks, consequently feminising everyday life and popular culture. The double bind that restricted women in between the notion of abstract and asexual motherhood, and the ‘trivial’ issues of femininity corresponds in my view to the gap between the essence and the display within the frame of Occidentalism. The essence of women was inherently national, yet abstract; their modern appearance on display, although concrete, had no connection to the substance and was ‘artificial’ — a theme that surfaces in many of Ataç’s talks, as we will see in the section on youth. The artificiality of appearance connotes the artificiality of

144

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Western-ness as such.29 In the case of women, artificiality, which was nevertheless necessary for a modern look, was compensated with an emphasis on modesty, which could replace the veil (Najmabadi 1998: 125, 132). Hence, women figured in the national discourse and were conveyed in the radio talks as a complex and contradictory issue. ‘The woman’ was glorified for her capacity for ‘natural’ national/modern tasks; she was set as a safeguard against the threatening excesses of civilisation. Hence, ‘the woman’ was abstracted as an ideal that informed radio talks. However, at the same time, the realm of women, or feminised culture, was associated with modern artifice. The Child Childcare, child education and pedagogy were among the most common topics of the radio talks. The child, both as a potential national being and a product of the family became a special focus of attention in those years. This was in accord with the demands of the age: ‘In any phase of humanity the child never received such concentrated attention as it does today’ (Selim S›rr› 1932: 11). This was the Age of the Child. Selim S›rr› referred to Rousseau’s Emile and many pedagogues in Europe who had taken the child as an object of analysis and discipline. He argued that there was a ‘child question’ today, just as there were questions of ‘economics, discipline, woman, marriage, and livelihood’ (28). Selim S›rr›’s talks took up several issues related to children. Some of these issues pertain to pedagogical methods, such as how to speak to children and answer their questions. Others, mostly discussed with reference to examples from Europe (Germany, France, Italy and Hungary), concern the institutional frameworks of discipline and education, such as kindergartens and boy scouts. But whatever the specific content, Selim S›rr›’s main argument remained the same: we do not give enough importance to the ‘child question’ in Turkey. This was primarily due to a lack of understanding that children had a world of their own. ‘We should stop fashioning the children in our own images,’ said Selim S›rr› (1932: 195), while reflecting on his own childhood, which had not been happy and free. Different from that of Europeans who could enjoy their childhood, the Turks’ way of disciplining produced ‘hesitant, timid and helpless’ children (53). Therefore, according to him, the Turks should replace the harsh methods of discipline inherited from the past with dialogue and understanding. ‘To talk and to make children talk’ — that is, ‘verbal communication’ — was the most powerful instrument of discipline (46), interestingly making an analogy with talking on radio. The new pedagogical methods suggested for childcare and discipline constituted a national issue. But as was the case in the themes discussed before,

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

145

the child question in Turkey was also received in relation to the West. Duru, similar to Selim S›rr›, referred to Rousseau’s Emile and to other philosophers and pedagogues — such as Montaigne, Spencer, Lebon and Montessori — in his talks, despite his special emphasis that ‘every child is a national being’ (1937). Duru also heralded the significance of the medical discourse for issues of discipline and claimed that the best contemporary European pedagogues were, at the same time, medical doctors.30 His personal diagnosis, as a medical doctor, for the child question in Turkey pointed to the lack of institutions and means that secured a separate and original environment that belonged to the child, and to the harsh and authoritarian methods of discipline, the heritage of the old regime. Hence, the new methods were important to symbolise the new regime in Turkey: ‘When Atatürk’s Turkey appeared as a new state in the history of humanity, then it is inevitable that childcare should not fall prey to the old mistakes’ (Duru 1937: 17). The symbolism of the child becomes apparent in Duru’s suggestion that the People’s Houses could be new locations for bringing together Turkish mothers and creating a new atmosphere for children. Paradoxically, children were not usually allowed to enter People’s Houses.31 The suggestion, then, is more rhetorical than practical. Not very different from the handling of the woman question, the child was taken as a symbolic mediator to ground the fantasy of modern nation. The new pedagogical methods were conceived both as ways of getting modern and as tropes of demarcating the difference from the West and the old regime. The notion of the child was even equated with the new nation itself, which found its expression in statements such as ‘The victory of humanity will be completed by the victory of the children’ (Duru, 1937: 16).32 Youth and Joy I find the emphasis on youth often mentioned in radio talks as one of the most striking and interesting themes. It is well-known that the nationalist ideology referred to the youth as the future of Turkey (Mustafa Kemal in his famous speech in 1927 especially addressed the youth); however, the theme of youth was taken quite differently in the radio talks. There, it referred less to a generation of young people than to ways of resisting old age and preserving health and beauty. The connection of these themes to the national ideal is complex. On the one hand, these comprise a secular conception of life against the religious idea of fate. In this respect, the national ideal is conceived in modern and secular terms. However, on the other hand, to the extent that the emphasis on youth evokes a denial of death and mortality, the modern ideal disavows reality and becomes phantasmatic. In this latter

146

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

aspect, not only the values of youth, but also the willpower to stay young was praised. In his talk entitled ‘Tips for Staying Young,’ Selim S›rr› said that ‘youth is a privilege, an honour’ as well ‘the happiest stage of life’ (1932: 64-5). He then followed with a promise to give important tips for staying young; he even reminded his listeners to have their pen and paper ready to write them down. But what followed was an abstract argument instead of practical hints. ‘Getting old means dying little by little each day. Then what should one do not to die?’ he asked. Although the question was quite ambitious, the answer was rather vague: ‘One should continuously struggle. What does life mean anyway other than constant struggle?’ (66) The attempt to deny death by constant struggle was mediated by a military metaphor. Selim S›rr› introduced the army as a metaphor for the body in that context. Yet, at the end of his talk, probably being aware of the practical insufficiency of these tips, he sarcastically told the audience that he ‘revealed some secrets for staying young, but if you have not listened carefully ... it is not my fault’ (69). The childish play with words could not altogether evade the fact that immortality was not a possible option, but Selim S›rr› talked as if it was possible. The more realistic tips he cited in other talks — such as the importance of fresh air, nutrition, sunshine and sports (75) — also gained their meaning in relation to the impossible ideal formulated as ‘What should one do in order not to die?’ Selim S›rr› often came back to this ideal, for example, by stating that old age and death (which only meant that the machine was not working naturally) could be avoided if one took good care of the machine, as the phrase ‘people do not die but they slowly commit suicide’ shows (70). But Selim S›rr› was not the only person entertaining fantasies of immortality. Kamay also took up the same question a decade later, in his talk entitled ‘Youth and Old Age’: ‘Is it possible to stay young and not get old?’ (1941: 60). He argued that [s]cience and experience have shown us that it is possible to postpone old age; stay young for a long time; and when finally old age arrives, to be still fit by abiding to the principles of health, by disciplining the soul and the body, by avoiding debauchery and bad habits, and by practicing hygienic rules. It is even in our capacity to make natural life longer (Ibid). This was possible just by resisting the intake of ‘poisons.’ His definition of old age was the slow and constant poisoning of the blood. He, too, believed in the maxim that ‘[h]uman beings don’t die but they kill themselves’ (61).

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

147

If people could say no to alcohol and tobacco, if they took care of their bodies, if they could be happy, and if they could keep their psychology strong by staying away from ‘psychological failures and deficiencies’ (63), then they could stay young. The desirable examples were to be found in Europe and America; the Westerners, with the help of the ‘progress of civilisation,’ had been able to reduce the ‘percentage of death and prolong average life’ (61). We may see that Kamay’s highly moralistic comments interestingly evoke themes pertaining to the government of life processes, akin to Foucualt’s concept of bio-power; however, rather than taking the issue as both an individual and a social question, his suggestions not only denied death but also the realm of the social. The question of life was instead reduced to willpower, echoing the voluntarism of the elite. The idea of staying young found its most absurd expressions in Ataç’s talks. After receiving letters of complaint from his female listeners, saying that he primarily talked on issues concerning young people, he devoted some of his radio talks to the problem of staying young, particularly addressing women. However, instead of entertaining the naive belief that old age could be postponed, as did his colleagues, he adopted a sarcastic style which made references to ‘appearing young,’ rather than actually ‘staying young’. In his talk entitled ‘How not to appear old,’ he said: ‘The life struggle of women is to resist old age’ (1943: 33). Here, he mentioned the role of makeup as an antidote to old age. In his words, to regard make-up as ‘artificial beauty’ implied that one denied the role of civilisation (34). Mocking the desire of women to appear young, as well as the ideal of civilisation, he suggested to women that they should have their portraits painted around the age of thirty; keeping that portrait next to the mirrors in their room, they should try to create, with the help of make-up, the same image on their faces in the years to come (35). As I have discussed above, Ataç always alluded to artificiality at the level of appearance, not simply to cancel the national ideals, but to point to the gap between display and essence. In his talks, youth was praised, but it was expressed in a language that stood on the brink of nonsense. Therefore, it is difficult to assess the seriousness of some of his tips, such as ‘you should not eat fish because then your skin will be like fish skin’ (91), or ‘women who take arsenic will have a beautiful complexion and long and healthy hair’ (92). He, like others, pointed to the importance of fresh air and a natural setting for beauty and youth, but his suggestion that people should live in villas in suburban areas, or if this was not possible, on the top floor of high buildings so that they would have a beautiful complexion and strong heart, reflects an attitude that trivialises and mocks both the issues discussed and himself for talking about them.

148

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Therefore, Ataç’s emphasis on youth provides another perspective for thinking about youth and the national/modern ideal with regard to Occidentalism. While, for example, Selim S›rr› talked about the ideal as a force that shaped the present, Ataç mocked the present by feminising and vulgarising it. The ideal, although strongly desired, was impossible to realise as long as civilisation already had a Western content, and the anxiety of imitation could never be relieved.33 The articulation of the ideal often evoked the self-attributed omnipotence of the elite seeking to be forever young. Yet, the anxieties concerning the real lingered in the form of futility and absurdity at the margins of the ideal. We must also mention the desirability of ‘joy’ accompanying the theme of youth in the radio talks in order to elucidate the phantasmatic ideal. ‘We Turks,’ said Selim S›rr›, ‘are usually quiet, reserved, proud and a little melancholic people; this has to do with the kind of discipline and education that has been given to us’ (1932: 189). The nation, therefore, had to learn how to be joyful, according to him. Joy was a question of ‘discipline and determination’ (193). It also had beneficial effects on the health and youth of the body. The theme reverberated in a popular children’s song: ‘Be joyful so that you can stay young!’ However, joy was also a trope through which the past regime and ‘Turkish nature’ could be problematised. Ertu¤ in his talk entitled ‘Be Joyful!’ referred to the same deficiency in Turkish culture: ‘The real Turkish self, its happy, honey-tongued, optimistic characteristics have been deteriorated by those bigots who churned up the country in the name of religion’ (1945: 123). Joy and happiness were praised in the radio talks to denigrate past forms of cultural activities and entertainment (predominantly for men), such as sitting in coffeehouses, drinking alcohol, and listening to alaturka songs. Thus, as opposed to the ills of the recent past, the present and the future were to be constructed with different sentiments. Those with a big smile should replace serious and sober faces. Ertu¤ admitted that the task was not easy. The Turks were ‘constructing a new building on the ruins of the old’ (125). The bricks for the new building were there; it was only a matter of creating new cement that would glue them together. ‘Only then, those who watch us from afar will see the difference’ (Ibid, emphasis added). Therefore, the new sentiments, such as joy and optimism, were not only regarded as the cement of society, but also as proof of civilisation, to be shown to those ‘who watch us.’ The joy was a political metaphor, very similar to ‘light’ in Enlightenment, against the dark faces of the past. According to Ertu¤, Turks should learn and experiment with these new emotions, because ‘we

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

149

still don’t have an authentic style of being joyful’ (125, emphasis added). While depicting yet another lack in Turkish nature and culture, the new emotions were nevertheless mobilised to support the existing national cultural policies, such as the campaign against alaturka music. ‘Don’t ever try to entertain yourself,’ said Ertu¤, ‘with those songs that are full of sighs (ah, of, aman)’ (127). Ertu¤’s positive examples came, not surprisingly, from the West. Americans, for example, could even find joy in taking risks; they had courage and initiative, which brought them success. Furthermore, as a doctor, he would advise joy as a cure for illnesses such as lack of appetite, constipation, and rheumatism, and, of course, as a method for staying young. The advised new sentiments mostly retained a metaphorical element that was utilised for a comparison with the West: in terms of what ‘we’ lack and what ‘they’ have. The lack was instrumental for the power regime, which attempted to fill it with the mediation of the elite. The lack was the lacuna within which new sovereignty was to be erected. Ataç’s handling of the theme of joy was no exception to this. Of course, he was more specific in his suggestions for being joyful, as would be expected from his style. For example, he despised rituals on religious holidays, which were boring and gloomy, and suggested instead that people should go to see plays, or go on a trip on those days. He advised secular forms of entertainment, which were civilised. But he also warned against the dangers of the new forms of entertainment, such as the possible harmful effects of movies on children. Thus, he also secured for himself and the elite in general the authority to judge what was good and what was bad. The Body All the recurring themes I have discussed so far — the family and men, the woman, the child and youth/joy — made ample references to the body as the site of national construction. The pedagogical strategies for governing bodies were always in tension with the disembodiment and disavowal entailed in the articulation of the national ideal. Selim S›rr›’s many talks were devoted to the importance of the body in national education. He used different metaphors for conceiving of the human body. As we have seen in the case where he regarded old age due to ‘improper working of the machine,’ one metaphor was that of the machine. He similarly talked of the ‘motor’ in the child (1932: 70). At other times, he talked of the body as a plant. ‘A child is like a plant,’ he said, while ‘the school is the garden, and the educators are the gardeners’ (14). Another metaphor for the body was the army: the body had the head as a commander and other organs as officers (68). All these diverse metaphors, rather than deploying a coherent epistemology of the body, made

150

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

sense in the context of educating and disciplining the body: ‘Physical education is a social but also a vital national issue. To take care of the education of the body is a national duty for those who love their country’ (116). Whatever the metaphor, the body was something to be constructed — to be fabricated, cultivated, and disciplined. The body, although inherently natural, was taken to be a cultural site that aided in the struggle for civilisation. How the body stood in the interstices of nature and culture significantly reveals the dynamics of Occidentalim. Even when the natural elements that nurtured the body — such as food, air, water, and sunshine — were mentioned, their importance was always assessed with references to Western life styles. For example, Selim S›rr› told his listeners that Europeans and Americans valued fresh air as they kept their windows open all the time or went on long walks in nature. ‘They do not stay inside, at home or in coffeehouses, spending all their time talking’ (73), as Turks do. Selim S›rr› thought that Turkish life was artificial: ‘We have moved away from nature. It is necessary to return to nature and learn how to benefit from its blessings’ (97). Thus, paradoxically even nature — with its different meanings ranging from character and essence to green areas — had to be constructed in civilised terms in Turkey. Similarly, nature was associated with modern science by Duru who regarded nature as the source of all knowledge against superstitions. Therefore, nature was not only what lay out there, but what was processed through the modern and represented as nature: ‘When we were children we were not very much interested in life. The children of today are closer to life and nature. They go outside their classrooms to have walks in the green’ (1937: 67). (Given that Turkey mostly consisted of rural areas at that time, this is indeed a strange statement evoking a second-order concept of nature.) The fabricated meaning of nature was mediated by scientific terminology. There was constant use of terms such as ‘oxygen,’ ‘carbon-dioxide,’ ‘ultraviolet’ and ‘infra-red rays’ to denote the various aspects of nature in the radio talks. Sports activities were regarded as one field that bridged nature and science through the body. Kamay said that the dissemination of sports activities in a nation was its ‘measure of civilisation and progress,’ and this was ‘a scientific, positive fact and principle’ (1941: 48). In a similar manner, he took eating habits as a measure of civilised life. He talked about the role of vitamins, and fresh fruit and vegetables for healthy and efficient bodies. This, too, was connected to a natural life style that had to be created, the exemplary case being the Western one. Kamay opted for a revolution in the kitchen: ‘We have to simplify our food which means that we have to make a revolution in our kitchens’ (70).

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

151

Here the concept of nature has a dual function. It refers at the same time to what exists and what has to be problematised and reconstructed. I will dwell more on the instrumentalisation of nature, culture and civilisation in the performance of Occidentalism in the following section. Nature, Culture and Civilisation The themes I have visited in the above sections illustrate that the operation of Occidentalism does not simply mean a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (the West). There were contradictory concerns for the elite to show that the nation had to be both natural and civilised. Not only civilisation already had a foreign content, but nature was also found lacking when seen from the projected viewpoint of the West. So how did radio govern the people according to the ideal of becoming both national and modern? Talking was regarded as an efficient instrument for making things happen. The emphasis on talking as a modern disciplinary method, especially in the disciplining of the child, had analogies to radio as a talking apparatus. For example, when Ataç suggested to parents to talk to their children after they saw a movie, in order to ‘correct and counter the harmful effects,’ the hidden reference must be to his own talk, which aimed to correct the matters of everyday life. Or, when Ertu¤ talked about the need to be joyful, he imagined the technological medium carrying the waves of joy and amplifying his own power: ‘I would very much like to send you impressions through radio waves that would make you forever smile, that would make you loudly and happily laugh’ (Ertu¤ 1945: 124). In a similar manner, Duru believed that, if radio transmissions had a wider reception, ‘thousands of Turkish mothers would be activated by his words and take the initiative’ for the ‘sacred unity of the Turkish mothers’ (1937: 31). Selim S›rr›, in a different yet related line, often ended his talks with the question of ‘how to talk.’ He dwelled on techniques of talking — the articulation of words, pronunciation, and style of delivery — to make the point that talking should aim at ‘clarity, truth and beauty,’ and that it should ‘convince, excite and make people think’ (1932: 345). These examples reflect a self-conscious attitude towards the technological medium. Talking on radio — the ideal radio voice34 — was regarded as having automatic effects for transforming the audience. In this way, radio technology became an extension of the self, or, in other words, an apparatus that amplified the political power of the elite. The elite imagined creating the nation in their own projections by talking on the radio. However, talking also conveyed disturbances, produced at the inevitable points of contact with reality. Ataç knew that in a fifteen-minute talk the

152

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

basics of child discipline could not be conveyed to the audience (1943: 51). It was evident in Ertu¤’s and Duru’s comments that radio broadcasting was limited both in its capacity to carry joy and in its geographical diffusion. The disturbances usually surfaced in the form of contradictions or excesses. Selim S›rr›, who was an admirer of the subtle disciplinary techniques of the West, argued in one of his talks, referring to German methods of education and discipline, that lecturing was not the best method for influencing children. ‘You are not supposed to lecture to children on how to love and defend their country. Children go around their country, visit its mountains, forests, rivers ... and they love the beautiful country they have seen, and because of this love they undertake the mission of working and fighting for it’ (1932: 61-2). However, in his only talk that directly addressed children, he did just the opposite. He talked about love for the country and lectured on the ways of loving it (246). Hence, he could not bridge the gap between his words and acts. In fact, the gap had roots in objective conditions, since it was unlikely at that time that the children of the major cities (whom he was primarily addressing) travelled around the country. We have seen that the woman, the child and youth were idealised tropes with no connection to the actual segments of the population. Moreover, their idealisation most often contradicted existing practice, such as the principle that denied children entry to the People’s Houses. Therefore, these categories served as mediating operators to ground the ideal. The unity regarding the origins and the future of the nation posited in the ideal was constructed against the existing divisions in society, such as gender, class, ethnicity, and language. The conflicts between the heterogeneous people and the elite; between men and women; between past and present; and between the West and Turkey were rendered insignificant and apolitical in the assumed unity of the nation. Yet, these divisions were not simply absent in the talks. Instead, as Jacqueline Rose would argue, the ‘moment of excess’ in the case of disavowal ‘always has something of the overstatement about it’ (1984: 37). Thus, the disavowed differences appeared as excesses that seemed mostly out of place in terms of the subject matters of the talks. For example, when ethnic divisions were countered with the idea that the new principles of discipline and education could produce a national character, the ethnic divisions were also pronounced. Duru used the analogy of the English national stamp that could be used to mould people of different ethnicities. Then, ‘those remnants of the communities that lack history and culture’ would be discouraged to adhere to different identities, and whatever their ‘national origins’ were, they would be united under the banner of Turkish nationalism (Duru 1937: 72). The statement sounds like an

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

153

inevitable reply to the conflicts within society, although the rest of the talk was premised on phantasmatic ideals.35 Similarly, Selim S›rr› had several subtexts in his talks, which can be interpreted as replies to existing worries and questions. He was most probably replying to the feminist arguments of equality worded by women writers and movements, when he insisted on the ‘special’ condition of women in Turkish society, which valued motherhood. Or, the pronounced concern that ‘some say that we are not capable of progress,’ which pointed to the debilitating difference between the West and Turkey, was answered by bringing in examples from the West: Edison, Wilson, Faraday or Rousseau, who had had a deprived childhood, managed to become ‘great men’ through their willpower (Selim S›rr› 1932: 226, 2314). These all can be considered attempts to address the prejudices of Orientalism and the consequent feelings of inferiority in the Turkish people. Direct comments on Turkish nationalism were also geared to address the projected Western gaze. Duru argued that Turkish nationalism was not monopolistic like Western nationalism, and this was an evident fact ‘whatever the foreigners and the enemies said’ (1937: 71). Duru’s words on the Turkish national character sound quite defensive. According to him, ‘a Turk only valued truth and reality, and kept away from illusions’ (Ibid, emphasis added). But his discourse became contradictory with his claim that ‘a Turk is modest and does not boast’ at a point when he was literally boasting. The excesses primarily reveal an ambivalent attitude towards the West, which had only recently been an enemy in the national war, but at the same time stood as the model of civilisation. Duru’s attempt to handle the ambivalence is significant: Once I read, with so much excitement, a poem written by Emin Bülent against the West that cried, ‘I am a Turk and an enemy to you even if I were left alone.’ It was the Western imperialism that strove to destroy us, not the absolute West; but who could, in those days of immense pain, differentiate the silent Western humanity from the mean Western imperialism? Today we are powerful; the imperialists who have failed to destroy us compete with each other to be our friends (1937: 74). The Turk, despite all the pains and difficulties that he had suffered, finally managed to assert his strength, according to Duru. Here, the reference to the powerful Turk is, of course, not independent from the talking subject. The elite perceived themselves as those with power who could create a ‘genuine’ Turkish nation through their mastery of Western techniques and knowledge

154

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

of civilisation. However, in order to project their self-image to the nation, by containing its divisions and assuming a unity, they had to go through several mediations. This was necessary, first of all, to secure their faith in the modern nation against the recurring sarcasm about its artifice. The point I have made above, that the radio talks predominantly addressed the elite themselves, finds support in Selim S›rr›’s statement: ‘Excitement is an electric power that agitates the whole nation. But that current should first be wound around its own spool’ (1932: 197-8). In other words, in order to be able to convince others, one should first be convinced oneself. Thus, the elite travelled through the mediating operators to arrive at the correspondence of the subject and the object — that is, their own political subjectivity and the nation. The images of civilisation, nature and culture were deployed to substantiate and justify the ideal. The body was regarded as a site for constructing the ideal. However, as we have seen, the body was both a natural and cultural entity. The body was a natural resource, which had to be culturally processed in order to be naturally connected to the nation. The natural in the body was conceived of with the help of cultural metaphors, while culture was fixed in imaginary ‘natural’ origins. The nation, therefore, was both a given (natural) and something to be constructed. Construction was set in terms of education and discipline. This formula has a strong resemblance to the one that Rousseau had presented in Emile (which was often cited in the talks on Turkish Radio). Rousseau regarded education as something that gives back to culture the nature it has destroyed (Rose 1984: 44). But the paradox of Rousseau’s argument lay in the fact that ‘the recreation of a natural man can only be a highly artificial process,’ which means that nature ‘is not something which can be retrieved, it has to be added’ (Ibid). The ‘natural’ supplement to culture came through the categories of the woman, the child, and youth/joy in the Turkish national discourse. These categories were treated as essential and natural depositories of truth, which could transgress the existing contradictions and divisions and guide the nation in its progress. However, they had a different connection to culture, different from what Rousseau envisaged or Marilyn Strathern depicted as conventional Western symbolisation (1995a: 189). According to Strathern, the Western symbolisation of culture and nature indicates an opposition that works within the logic of control and colonisation. Nature is regarded as something to be acted upon, while culture is an artifice. Yet, being grounded in nature and natural differences legitimatises culture. Gender, according to Strathern, plays an important role for legitimisation. However, we see a different matrix in the Turkish national discourse conveyed by the

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

155

talks on radio. First of all, nature could not be taken as a given. In the Turkish case, nature was already lacking, and even artificial when seen through the eyes of the West. Turkish nature had to be reconstructed upon a new model; in other words, Turkish nature had to be cultivated along the principles of the Western civilisation. Secondly, culture belonged, in fact, to the domain of the national elite’s activities (talking, in the particular case of radio), through which the modern nation had to be made. The elite naturally embodied culture, as they regarded themselves as the sole mediators between the authentic values and the West. Therefore, they could not pose culture merely as artifice, since they wanted to secure their own position as natural. At this point, we may remember what Ziya Gökalp said on culture, that it consisted of ‘the emotions that can neither be made by method nor taken from other cultures by mimesis.’ Artifice was the greatest source of anxiety for the Turkish elite because of its connotations of imitation of Western culture. Therefore, while Turkish nature could be problematised, culture had to stay an ambiguous realm (between nature and culture), leaving room for the interpretation and mediation of the elite. One significant example of this comes from the conception of the new Turkish language. As we have seen in the BBC’s frustration about the ‘proper’ Turkish language, the new language was highly arbitrary and fluid. Rousseau’s scepticism towards language, ‘as a flaw on the world which breaks up the essential continuity of nature and damages our relationship to it’ (Rose 1984: 46), was not openly shared by the Turkish elite. Instead, examples of artifice in the language were criticised in order to generate new initiatives to create the artifice as civilisation. For example, although the style of language used in the radio programmes was often problematised, the new language was nevertheless adopted as the only efficient means of constructing the ideal. Culture was not attached to any external principle that could make the elite accountable. Culture was immediate, flexible and performative. Thus, not nature and culture, but nature and civilisation were contrasted to each other in the Turkish matrix. Civilisation was treated as a set of external (Western) norms and techniques that would introduce the dynamics of change and transform the (Eastern) nature, which was lacking from the projected viewpoint of the West. But when looked at from the other side, the assumed nature could compensate the ills of artifice (Western civilisation) and make it authentic. The mediating operators, then, are tropes informed by Occidentalism. The woman, the child, and youth were simultaneously the natural departure points and the civilised points of arrival. They signified both essence and change. But paradoxically these tropes also served as depositories for the images of the ideal. The elite, in their phantasmatic pro-

156

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

jections of the ideal through these mediators involuntarily feminised and infantilised culture.36 The feminisation of culture was coupled by the ‘feminine’ iconography of the regime.37 A parallel national iconography was centred on children.38 Despite their assumed expert authority positions, the elite produced themselves as the forever young sons of the projected nation, which was expected to be an embracing mother to all. I started this chapter by pointing to a comic strip that used the woman as a metaphor for radio. Through the themes visited in the talks I have attempted to show how the elite was captured in phantasmatic idioms and, consequently, in the fantasy of the omnipotent subject vis-à-vis the radio voice assuming a maternal quality. I would like to end by referring to another comic strip. In this one, as the family listens to the radio in the living room, the child asks the father: ‘Father, who first invented radio?’ The father answers: ‘Our father Adam did, son, from his left rib!’39 The mother and the grandmother remain silent. Radio and culture were feminised, yet women actually silenced. I will further discuss the ‘absent’ women of the nation by analysing radio dramas in the following chapter.

RADIO TALKS: THE FOREVER YOUNG NATION

— Father, who first invented radio? — Our father Adam did, son, from his left rib! Comic strip by Ramiz. Radyo, vol.2, no.16, 15 March 1943, p.21.

157

The ‘magical door’ of radio drama: Two actors, Vahyi Öz and Reflat Altay are seen using the ‘magical door’ in the radio studio during the production of a radio drama. The door was regarded as ‘magical’ by radio producers since it could be utilised for performing a variety of acts. Radyo, vol.1, no.8, 15 June 1942, p.14.

6 RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

Radio drama had its golden age in Turkey during the 1940s. Drama was regarded as an especially advantageous form to transmit national ideals in a lively style. But the liveliness of radio drama, especially in its early years, was so captivating that most often dramas were perceived as if they were directly mirroring reality. Radio drama that moved ‘between dream and reality, the inner world of the mind and the outer world of concrete objects’ (Esslin 1980: 184) led to ‘framing errors,’ in Crisell’s words (1994: 162). The framing errors were not peculiar to dramas on Turkish Radio, of course. Crisell discusses cases in Britain or the USA, demonstrating how the audience took dramas literally, when, for example, they were ‘sending flowers to the studio after the death of a character in a soap opera’ (Ibid). However, in Turkey it was not only the audience but also the radio producers and state officials who approached radio dramas as if they were real. An actor’s memoir from the beginning of the 1940s is striking in that it reveals a significant framing error.1 According to the memoir, a group of men (their identity is not revealed, but their affiliation with the state is implied) interrupted the live broadcasting of a radio drama on Ankara Radio. The men hurried to the Ankara Radio building to stop the transmission as the drama was being performed, since they thought that the play contained anti-military messages. Had they been patient enough to hear the twist of the story,2 they would have understood that the play was in fact supporting the army. Given that there was heavy censorship of the plays to be broadcast on radio, and that all drama texts, including this particular one, were sent to the Ministry of the Press and Publications and even to the General Staff before their transmission, the error reveals the childish and, if we may say so, the feminine impact of radio drama on the audience (including the state officials).3 Fiction and reality came closest to meeting in the radio drama.

160

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

If the BBC Turkish Service saw news programmes as essential for manufacturing the ‘truth,’4 Turkish Radio, on the contrary, resorted to fiction.5 It is interesting that the BBC in its 1966 reply to the Turkish broadcasters’ request for information on educational programmes only repeated what had been obvious to Turkish broadcasters for many years.6 The BBC advised the dramatic form: ‘A good deal of the Drama output presents contemporary social problems in a way calculated to lead to discussions.’7 Despite the debates on their quality,8 radio drama and the dramatic form were prioritised for cultural and educational purposes in Turkey. Then the question arises: Why was fiction privileged over factual output — such as the domestic news and features programmes, or documentaries — in Turkish radio broadcasting? Or, to put it in different words, why was there a tendency to invest in fiction to represent reality? In this chapter, I analyse the dramatic form of representation on Turkish Radio to reflect on the questions raised above — that is, what do the fantasies staged in radio dramas convey about the subjectivity of the elite in connection to their perception of the nation and the West? And how are these to be connected to the gendered aspects of making and imagining the modern nation in an Occidentalist framework? I have already discussed the notion that radio talks allowed its authorspeakers an extended authority, supplemented by the technology of voice, which equated talking with making things happen. The body was posited as the site of national construction in a matrix of nature and civilisation. The national ideals that portrayed ‘a union with the world’ were grounded in the mediating categories such as the woman, the child and youth. I have posited that the outcome of these complex mediations were the feminisation and infantilisation of culture, within which the elite spoke as the forever-young sons of the nation. Here, I investigate more deeply this subject-position of the elite vis-à-vis the more life-like fantasies of the nation and the West manifested in radio dramas. Occidentalism made a significant reference to the role of the woman in its boundary management between the nation and the West. Women symbolised the ‘border guards’ (Armstrong 1982) to signify the nation as both modern and authentic. Women were incorporated into the modern national fantasy as abstract symbols, but excluded as subjects. In this respect it is especially interesting to see how women as the blind spots of the subjectivity of the male elite are characterised and speak in dramas as ‘real’ persons. The positioning of women characters in radio dramas could point not only to the dynamics but also the limits of the Occidentalist projection of the national elite.

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

161

I will specifically analyse two radio dramas, which are significant examples of ‘realistic’ portrayals of men and women in family life, as opposed to the naive symbolism often seen in other radio dramas of the period. These convey the role of women in a more complex dramatic action. They also bring into view the splits of men in relation to women. Here it is possible to detect the significations of change and stability perceived in terms of a series of interconnected dichotomies — man/woman, urban/rural, past/present, Western/Turkish. These dichotomies, represented through gendered terms and employed to manufacture the immediate national truth in radio dramas, bear on the subjectivity of the elite.9 The core problematique of change and stability that confronts us vividly in radio dramas once again demonstrates how radio technology was employed for performing boundary management within Occidentalism. Radio technology, among other technologies of the early twentieth century, allowed a wider, less solid and more sentimental dissemination of the effects of power. In comparison to writing, for example, radio was employed for the control of the masses due to its apparent capacity to encompass and smooth out differences in public address, thus enabling the maintenance of ‘a certain universalizing account of the modern’ (Huyssen 1986: 56). Thus, radio technology of the twentieth century put Turkey’s elite in a different position, in terms of imagining and representing their modern identity, from the earlier versions of the modern elite as legislators in Europe, for example (Bauman 1989b). The Turkish elite were already performing in an age that came to know the threat of the masses, represented by revolutionary upheavals in Europe, especially the October Revolution of 1917. Thus, in Chatterjee’s word (1993a), one ‘derivative’ aspect of modernity for the Turkish elite was to take the ‘best’ of Western modernity while rejecting the consequences of possible frictions between classes and ethnic groups. The technical was opposed to the social in this framework. Technology was categorised as a neutral weapon of Western civilisation, which was considered pragmatically to be in the service of national tasks — national unity in the political and economic spheres. The discourse of modernity was translated into a mechanical vision of progress, combined with an organic vision of society. Change was celebrated in the realm of techniques, while the social was protected from the evils of change. The elite, therefore, by appropriating ‘the most advanced techniques of civilisation’ (a phrase that also justified the introduction of radio broadcasting) could envision themselves as the carriers of civilisation, as long as society remained stable. The empowering vision of technology was gendered. The paradoxical change without change in the Occidentalist framework opposed the active willpower of the elite to the

162

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

passive docility of the mass; or in a similar logic, the contrast between civilisation and nature found its most complex expressions around the representation of women, as we will see in radio dramas centring on the theme of family. Family dramas were based mainly on the everyday life of fictive, representative families in both urban and rural areas. However, family drama was not a particular genre with a clearly defined format. Content was more important than form in the classification of dramas.10 If family was a primary theme, national dramas constituted the second major group. The latter were about the revolution, the heroic performances of the national leader, or about prominent figures and events in the national struggle. These were treated as epics of a newly born nation. Family dramas, on the other hand, dwelled on imagining the new life in Turkey. Family dramas addressed the present and the future, while national dramas mainly engaged with the recent past. Yet, it is apparent that family dramas were also connected to the nation in several ways. Their first and most important mission was to educate families in the new patterns of living.11 What Mustafa Kemal had said about ‘removing myths from minds, eradicating the established power of the old regime’ in the context of the Turkish Revolution was already associated with drama as form.12 Mustafa Kemal had been the first dramaturgist of the Turkish Republic, according to Metin And (1983). The national leader personally edited the plays written for National Theatre performances and was especially sensitive to issues regarding women. The portrayal of women on stage needed special attention.13 Family dramas, therefore, assumed the task to introduce new civilised images for women,14 as well as attempting to solve the crises in domestic life.15 What was directly expressed in radio talks found its fictive examples in radio dramas, which were thought to have a stronger emotional hook compared to the pedantic talks. The Blind Medium of Radio Drama When situated within the institutional framework of Turkish Radio, which privileged the dramatic form for cultural education especially in the 1940s, the particular form of radio drama in terms of its production, regulation and subject matter provides significant clues for interpreting the Occidentalist political subjectivity. The primary defining feature of radio drama — that it is ‘blind’ (Arnheim 1993) and produces a soundscape substituting for a landscape and evokes an imaginary public — has been very important for experimenting with Occidentalist tropes in Turkey. Radio drama was seen as a problematic form when it was first introduced in the initial years of radio broadcasting in many countries. Radio drama

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

163

took classical stage drama as its model, but actually fell short of the model, for it lacked the visual elements and the public audience that characterised stage drama. In Britain, for example, radio drama did not acquire the status of an art of its own for a long time and was not taken seriously by literary and art critics, partly due to its blind medium, partly because it belonged to popular culture, as opposed to the high culture of the theatre (P. Lewis 1981). Peter Lewis has argued that the importance and the original possibilities of radio drama (not radio drama) had not been realised until the 1960s in the BBC. However, he notes, ‘once we place the BBC in a world context we immediately recognise how fortunate we have been and still are’ (1981: 4). The BBC, according to Lewis, represents ‘the strongest traditions of radio drama in the world ... perhaps even the best’ (7). Although the BBC did not experiment with the possibilities of the medium for a long time, unlike the German Hörspiel,16 the BBC is still considered to have set the canon of radio drama.17 A comparison between the BBC and Turkish radio drama of the 1940s shows that the BBC was exclusively dependent on classical drama for its radio drama output,18 whereas in Turkey in the same years radio drama had its own niche. The Radio Drama Department produced a large of number of plays written specifically for radio, as well as a number of adaptations or broadcasts of stage dramas.19 Furthermore, the dramatic form was applied to educational verbal programmes, which ran as series and centred on domestic and everyday subjects.20 However, these were all based on fiction, and there was no features department, such as the one in the BBC, which contributed to the production of ‘imaginative documentaries’ (P. Lewis 1981: 7),21 and served as a ‘publicity weapon’ during the war.22 The dramatic form peculiar to the medium of radio exhibits some characteristics that are worthy of interest. The long debates on the problems of the specific genre of radio drama convey how closely drama has been associated with spectacle, or with ‘ostention,’ to use Crisell’s word (1994). However, ostention seems impossible in radio drama, which, in resorting to words and sounds only, codifies the visual through the auditory. This situates radio drama in the realm of make-believe, more so than stage dramas. Radio drama renders ‘a dream world without a consistent solid reality’ (Gray 1981). Thus, the distinction between fact and fiction becomes blurred; this, in turn, gives the medium its original capacity to play with the fluidity of the concepts. Radio drama evokes the imagination of the audience, which attributes meanings more freely to what is heard, compared to what is seen. Furthermore, the soundscape of the radio drama invades the private realm and can be interiorised more easily within the temporal and spatial confines

164

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

of an everyday setting. Thus, the symbolic and indexical significations of sounds are immersed in a process of cultural familiarisation (Crisell 1994).23 The producers of Turkish Radio were well aware of the characteristics of the blind medium. Both radio drama and radiophonic dramatic series were designed to encompass all subjects on the national agenda — ‘literary, historical, social, moral, economic, hygienic, psychological, geological, etc ...’24 — and render them intelligible to the mass audience in a non-pedantic style. Yet, the ascribed educational values most often shadowed the artistic considerations in the production of radio dramas. The subject-matter was of utmost importance and under strict control and censorship.25 The elements that were censored varied from political opposition to obscenity, but the themes of suicide, anxiety, and ‘pessimist feelings’ were also forbidden in radio dramas (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 231). The second concern was to make sure that radio drama addressed a mass audience. The mass character of the audience, in a way, justified the selection of topics for dramas. In countrywide contests organised to motivate playwriting for radio, it was announced that the authors were free to choose their topics, but they had to keep in mind that they were addressing a large mass, both in the cities and in the villages: ‘The broadcast plays, whether of social, ethical, military or cultural character, are to be written in a style that aims to address directly the mass, not a specific group of people.’26 This meant that the topics had to be oriented towards the nation. Kemal Tözem, the head of the Drama Department at Ankara Radio, believed that radio dramas were very important for educating the people. They fostered the unification of the nation’s accents and lexica and presented all national, social and factual subject-matter much more vividly and to a larger mass, when compared to other media, such as theatre, books, and the press.27 He said: ‘If people get used to listening to radio plays, then there would be a modern stage in each living room, which is rich in its setting and props to the extent of richness of imagination; and which would make the listeners laugh and think at the same time’ (emphasis added).28 The blind medium of radio drama was certainly regarded as advantageous in its capacity to evoke the national imagination, but there were also critics who expressed the limitations of radio drama as an art. As in the British case, theatre critics did not and do not take radio drama seriously. Books written on Turkish theatre (Ak› 1968; And 1983; Ertu¤rul 1989; Halman 1976; Nutku 1976; fiener 1971) significantly do not dwell on radio drama. For example, Metin And mentions radio drama only in one sentence, stating that although ‘radio is an effective medium, radio drama has not reached a mature state due to lack of interest’ (1983: 34). Haldun Taner, a famous and

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

165

successful Turkish playwright, when expressing his doubts about opening the doors to local writers in theatre, mentioned radio as a bad example; he believed that this would degrade theatre and reduce it to the ‘level of radio or local film’ (cited in And 1983: 400). Catering to the tastes of the masses, a concern for radio drama, was a problematic concept for theatre, which strove to maintain its status of high art.29 Actors, on the other hand, who performed both on stage and through the microphone, found radio drama frustrating.30 Kemal Tözem, as the director of the Radio Drama Department, noted that actors needed and longed for costumes, make-up, gestures, and, most importantly, applause for their performances. In this context, he thought that their sacrifice in radio drama, which relied only on sound and words and lacked the direct response of the audience, should be especially appreciated.31 The only compensation for the lack in a radio drama was its capacity to reach the masses, as one actor expressed in an interview. He found acting in radio drama unsatisfactory, but ‘radio has its own characteristics ... It addresses a larger mass of people.’32 Yet, despite all frustrations and criticisms the Turkish broadcasters generally celebrated radio drama for fulfilling particular missions. It was even promoted as art by some. For example, in a TRT booklet from the 1970s, which includes tips for writing radio plays, it is argued that radio drama is a new art form: ‘the fact that it is not performed on stage does not relegate it to the status of non-art.”33 However, as I have emphasised, the main task of radio drama in early republican history was its propagation of national ideas, which usually contradicted the idea of an authenticity of art. In this sense, radio drama was considered primarily in instrumental terms; it was useful as an effective weapon. An earlier version of ‘How to Write Radiophonic Plays?’ made this clear: ‘Each word, in a radio drama, must be used in its proper place so that a specific idea is realised in the imagination of the listener’ (emphasis added).34 Broadcasters believed (or wanted to believe) that words or signs in a radio drama were in direct correspondence with the signified. This was also evident in the censorship rules that applied to dramas before they went on air.35 Dramas or dramatic sketches were given the mission of realising the concepts seen and desired by the writers and/or producers.36 Radio drama, therefore, stood in the interstice of reality and fantasy. Fantasy was reckoned to represent the desired reality. However, given the specifics of the medium, fantasy had to rely on the organisation of sounds and words only. The production of sound effects, for example, was very important for creating the reality of the fantasy. Tahsin Temren, remembered by later broadcasters as an institution of his own, was Ankara Radio’s first sound engineer. He worked miracles by using simple devices. Ertu¤rul

166

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

‹mer, first an apprentice to Temren, then a long-term sound engineer at Ankara Radio, has told amazing stories about their invention of novel sound effects.37 ‹mer also developed certain norms that guided him when preparing sound tracks. Using recorded music, he selected international music for urban love stories and folk music for rural settings. Folk music was already being processed by a systematic effort at Ankara Radio and other institutions, so he made use of those samples. Thus, a whole national landscape was simulated in the void of the studio.38 Even the sounds of nature, supposedly in Anatolia (which was glorified in the dramas), came from the studios in Ankara or recordings made in the environs. For example, ‹mer produced the sound of a village stream from gutters in Ankara. ‹mer took very seriously the make-believe world he created for the audience; sound effects in radio dramas, according to him, ‘replaced the setting, the space, the accessories, the emotional atmosphere.’39 In this way, sounds acquired both symbolic and indexical characters, which became conventionalised and naturalised by repetition. This explains why, as Crisell argues, ‘studio simulations of sounds can often sound more “real” than the actual sounds themselves would’ (1994: 47). The national feelings invested in sounds and words and reproduced by radio technology facilitated the construction of a uniform imaginary national space and a homogeneous national time. Most of the radio dramas broadcast by Turkish Radio exhibit efforts to construct a unified national space and time. However, despite the instrumentalist treatment of radio dramas, it would be wrong to find a monolithic meaning in them. Drama, which uses dialogue to make its meanings, often conceals the dialogic character of language,40 and renders it invisible by using manifest dialogue ‘in the frame of a mere conversation between persons’ (Morson and Emerson 1990: 316). Drama, written in a style confined to its ‘author’s ultimate semantic authority,’41 in Mikhail Bakhtin’s words (such as national radio drama in Turkey), appears direct, unmediated, and referentially oriented, so that ‘it recognises only itself and its object, to which it strives to be maximally adequate’ (Morson and Emerson 1990: 148). It is the author who imposes from outside the finalisation on the lives of the characters who speak unselfconsciously. Yet, in radio drama the finalisation is never final. The ‘hidden speech center’ in radio drama — that is, the author’s semantic authority — is challenged by the medium, which is geared to reach to masses and defines the drama not as an authentic art, but as an instrument of reality (which goes against the author’s artistic autonomy and authority). The significance of the specific text is immersed in the significance of the impact on the masses. The technologisation of drama, as it were, makes it less of a monad by reintro-

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

167

ducing political voices to the text, produced by the effects of reality. While, in Simmel’s words, the ‘actor’s portrayal keeps us apart from the world of reality’ (1973: 306), in the spectacle of stage drama, radio drama inserts fantasy into reality, thus making the fantasy character of reality more evident. It is this characteristic of radio drama that lends itself to an analysis of political subjectivity. I will try to bring into focus the processes of the texts — the cracks and gaps in the dramas (the limitations of the author’s semantic authority as far as it cannot account for the characters’ actions within the logic of the text) — to detect the hidden dialogic character of the national meaning in dramas. The treatment of women in radio drama provides a rich source for my analysis. Given all these considerations regarding radio drama — their instrumentalist use, their educative content, and the technology of sound used for simulations of reality — I will now look closely at two dramas that portray families, with special emphasis on the role of women in national life.42 Stability and Change/Women and Men The woman was an essential signifier for a number of concepts associated with Turkish nationality in radio dramas. Women symbolized nature, truth, stability, and imagined origins. The drama Tarihin Kaybetti¤i K›z (The Girl Whom History Lost) can be cited as one naive example for the use of symbols. In this play, a girl by the name of Saadet (literally, ‘happiness’) has escaped to Istanbul during World War II and is lost to a man named Tarih (literally, ‘history’). In Istanbul, she falls into the clutches of black-market profiteers. History arrives in Turkey looking for the girl and saves her from the black-marketeers. The summary of the play says: ‘History could not let Happiness, who escaped from the hell of the world take refuge in Istanbul, to be victimized by black marketers.’43 The highly symbolic character of the play is decipherable with its obvious references to World War II and the peace in Turkey, but also to the activities of black-marketeers in Istanbul. First, it is symbolic that ‘happiness’ embodied as the young girl who is in danger in the world escapes to Istanbul (Turkey, of course, was not in the war). Then, History (who symbolises an exterior element, Western civilisation) has to save her from the degeneracy of Istanbul. Thus, History not only symbolises Western civilisation, but also serves to juxtapose the purity of national power in Ankara against the degeneracy of Istanbul. It is also noteworthy that purity and happiness — embodied in a young girl’s physique, symbolising the best of Western civilisation — can neither survive in the West nor in Istanbul (the place of decadent Westernism), but has to be redeemed by Ankara Radio.

168

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Another example is the drama Vadiye Dönüfl (Return to the Valley),44 in which a romantic encounter of urban and rural lives is symbolised by the love story of an urban man (educated in Switzerland and blinded by an illness) and a village woman (who speaks proper Turkish and represents the high essence of Turkishness in her pure character). The woman, Ayfle, is a village teacher who works for the prosperity of the beautiful village, about which the blind man Nedim is ignorant at first. However, love shows him the truth. The sound of Ayfle’s piano-playing reveals to him the real essence of Turkey, which he can not see. He comes to love and celebrate the place where he really belongs. Nedim says that he envies the beautiful life here, which becomes even more enviable due to the opening of a new village school. The village is transformed by this event into a modern city, but one without the ills and impurities of (Western) city life. In this play, Ayfle symbolizes the stable truth of national life (which evokes itself through sound, very much like radio), which transforms the blinded Westernised intellectual, to create a desired synthesis. In both of these dramas, women lead to certain changes without changing themselves. Their natural and pure characters are deployed in an abstract manner, as a concept that has no body, no self, and no contradictions. They are mere symbols. It is the men who have to act, to choose between bad and good. But it is also the men who are susceptible to deception, either by evil forces or by their own blindness. In the following two dramas, which I will analyse in greater depth, these themes persist. However, women are portrayed in these two as more developed characters, not just as mere symbols of a concept or entity (happiness or purity). Therefore, the mechanisms involved in the representations of women and the subjectivity of men in relation to those representations can be observed in their complexity. Reconstruction Euphoria in a Turkish Town45 This drama depicts a series of fantasies and interweaves them with elements of the national discourse. Space, time and gender figure as significant factors in these interconnected fantasies. The play starts in a coffeehouse in an Anatolian province. (The author notes at the beginning that ‘the local dialects inform the audience that the place of action is not Istanbul.’) The conversations of local people in the coffeehouse, with the accompaniment of a traditional local poet, introduce the problem on which the dramatic action is based. The problem is the following: Tüccar Mehmet (Mehmet the Tradesman), the elder brother of Attar (a local man), has run away with his money (that he had raised in his own town) to Istanbul, leaving his wife and children. He has a relationship with a ‘mademoiselle’ in Istanbul and lives in

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

169

an apartment in Beyo¤lu (a district of Istanbul famous for its night life and multi-ethnic population.) But a rumour making the rounds indicates that he recently lost all his money and is on the verge of bankruptcy. The action starts with the elder brother turning up unexpectedly at the village coffeehouse. The crowd asks him about Istanbul, about the green eyes of the ‘mademoiselle.’ But the men also blame him for what he did. Tüccar Mehmet, in the position of the guilty, wants to go back to his family and seek forgiveness. As the horse-carriage takes him home with his brother and the poet, he looks around the town in amazement. Tüccar Mehmet: What on earth has happened here? ... How much it has changed ... I would not have recognized the place even though I was born here. Attar: But I wrote to you about it. Tüccar Mehmet: I did not take it seriously then. You know I have been to Europe, too ... This place is just like Europe. Coachman: God forbid! ... Don’t talk inauspiciously ... (The coachman speaks in the dialect of Thrace.) Tüccar Mehmet: Yaa, you are right ... Europe now is an ash heap ... Coachman: Yaa, there it is an ash heap, here it is a rose garden. ... See the asphalt road starts here. Poet (playing his saz): Don’t talk inauspiciously! What is Europe anyway? No error in the metaphor It is a donkey compared to deer ... (They laugh) (72) The coachman and Attar go on reporting all the major changes in the town during the journey. They talk about how swamps were drained, how new roads and houses with pools were built, how new housing has been developed for nomadic people. Tüccar Mehmet thinks that the town now looks like Nice, France. The analogy with the French town is immediately tied to Atatürk Square and ‹nönü Park, which make the Turkish town resemble Nice. The reconstruction along the coast is described by using terms such as modern tesisat (‘modern equipment’). Tüccar Mehmet learns from his brother and the coachman that new schools, an institute for girls (teaching domestic skills), as well as a Halk Odas› (Community Room),46 have been opened in the town. He discovers that his own son works for the Güzellefltirme Cemiyeti (Union for the Beautification of the Town), while his daughter attends the K›z Enstitüsü (Institute for Girls). He is surprised to hear that the coachman’s

170

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

son had the role of Hamlet in a play staged by the Halk Odas› and that his daughters play the piano and paint pictures. In the conversation, they mention that all Turkish young people are very talented, and even a young person from Yozgat (a provincial town in central Turkey) shocked the English visitors in his London exhibition. However, the new changes, it is said, are not only confined to the realm of fantasy.47 New technological and industrial developments also have occurred. The secret to this lies in the ‘cooperation of the people with the government’ — in other words, people without means work for the various community projects, while the rich make financial contributions; they have not let black-marketeers get involved in the financing of the projects. They have organized creative events, such as camel wrestling, to collect money. (‘Of course not New Year parties ... or festivals, or garden parties,’ says Attar. It is stated that those garden parties ruined Tüccar Mehmet.) Above all, there is praise for the new governor who initiated this zeal for change. Tüccar Mehmet, although struck by all these changes, oscillates between admiration and disbelief. Nonetheless, both the coachman and his brother respond convincingly to all the doubts he raises. They assure him that they know what they are talking about, that they have learned so many new things, either from their children in the school or from the radio. (The coachman says he does not own a radio set yet, but he hears about the broadcasts from his daughters.) They argue that the war years have been particularly beneficial for Turkey, which stayed out of the war. Tüccar Mehmet accepts the arguments with the conclusion that ‘[t]his country has fallen into a romantic passion for reconstruction’ (82). The poet’s songs relevant to the topic often interrupt the conversation. When they finally arrive at his home, Tüccar Mehmet is even more surprised to see his house renovated. A young woman servant, with a clean dress and apron, meets them at the door. She impresses Tüccar Mehmet, who comments that his house has been ‘modernised.’ It does not smell, and the toilets are new. Attar goes in to see the ‘housewife.’ (She doesn’t have a name but is only referred to as the ‘housewife.’ She speaks with a rural accent.) Attar tells her that they have a guest from Istanbul. She suggests preparing some local food for the guest, but Attar objects: ‘A person coming from Istanbul would have difficulty digesting tel kaday›f [a local dessert] ... Let us not be hard on his stomach. Let your daughter cook, so that she can show the new skills that she has learned at the Institute’ (84). (Young girls were introduced to Western cuisine there.) Then Attar implies that her husband wants to make up with her. To his question, ‘Can you forgive him?’ the ‘housewife’ answers humbly that she is in no position to judge him, since he is the father

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

171

of her children. She adds that his misbehaviour was due to ‘illness’: Housewife: I always believed that Mehmet Bey has fallen prey to some illness. We are a big family ... if one of us gets ill; do we have to be angry with him? In fact, the disease he caught is a contagious one ... Didn’t you see that in Istanbul? Those people who raise some money end up in Europe instead of spending their money for their country ... Immediately to Europe ... as if there cannot be good things in our country. Thank god that my children are not like that (84). She even suggests helping him financially when told that he lost all his money. When she hears that he has ended his relationship with the ‘mademoiselle,’ she comments: ‘Of course, what else would you expect from that woman?’ (86). At the end of the play, the housewife finally learns that her husband is there in the house, and that it was a false rumour that he lost all his money. Tüccar Mehmet, in the next room with his son, already busy in dealing with the finances of the Güzellefltirme Cemiyeti, has heard his wife’s tolerant words. He says: ‘Oh, my woman ... My woman who is full of true and high feelings ... I have heard all you said’ (88). The play ends with the poet’s song: Camels wrestle Nomads have a home Hand in hand they work The state and the people Beautify the town It is everybody’s goal To stay here forever One has to accept the struggle And not leave here. It is interesting that the play based on a simple dramatic action touches upon so many fantasies that become linked to nationalistic aspirations. The prominent theme of reconstruction involves an almost magical change in the town. Both nature and culture are transformed to create a dreamlike Turkish town where everybody is happy to work together and with the government, to educate themselves, to build the most advanced technological enterprises and a green natural landscape. The change also involves Westernisation — not only with its modern arrangements, but with the actual modernisation

172

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

of the people, who now play the piano, paint pictures, dress like Europeans (the servant, for example), know Shakespeare, and so on. Thus, the play renders the fantasies of change desirable in comparison to Europe. However, the comparison with Europe also brings into focus the undesirable elements of Western-ness, such as the war that made an ash heap of Europe. Therefore, the dreamlike Turkish town represents a better world in its Turkish-ness. The better world is described in terms of traditional elements that have been saved from change: the cooperation among the people (the word imece is used to denote the long tradition of solidarity in Anatolian villages), the coffeehouse where people meet and discuss things, the local poet who continues the oral cultural tradition, and the ascribed desire of the people to stay there forever. The juxtaposition of elements of change and stability involves no dynamic element of time. The eternal national time brings together past and future in an empty form. There is no dramatic ‘collision,’ to use Lukacs’s word.48 Nor is there an action that ‘moves forward with each phrase of the dialogue’ (Lukacs 1973: 284). Even Tüccar Mehmet’s awakening to the changes in the town is timeless and without forward movement, since he has already chosen to come back to his town with his money, as we discover at the very end. The restrained action of the drama, which avoids collisions — and by that I mean that there are no dynamics (except for a romantic passion for reconstruction) and no consequences of the change (except for an indefinite harmony and happiness) — is best represented by the ‘housewife.’ She represents the traditional values that changes have not altered (and perhaps could not alter). She stills cooks local foods and speaks with a rural accent. At the same time, she is praised as the heroine of the drama, with her capacity to understand the ills of society, almost in terms of sociology and psychology, and to forgive and cure them. The author’s semantic authority, therefore, cannot account for her tolerant behaviour. She stands outside the dramatic action: She has had such a character all her life, and she will be like that forever. In the same way, in signifying the good in the play by this timeless, passive and forgiving woman, the author cannot account for the dynamics of change. Change is linked back to stability in a circular manner, conveying a drama of change without change. I argue that neither traditional stability nor the elements of modern change are absorbed in the dramatic action. The only dynamic element in the play — one that figures and refigures within the time of the drama — is the sexuality of Tüccar Mehmet. The green eyes of the ‘mademoiselle’ echo in the people’s conversations. The crowd in the coffeehouse says: ‘Come here tomorrow, Tüccar Mehmet ... They say she has green eyes. Come and tell us

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

173

what she thought about you ...’ (71). Even the housewife acknowledges the desire for the green eyes. She remembers that when she was briefly together with her husband in Istanbul he experienced a crisis one day: ‘Oh, my God ... I remember the day he was knocked down by illness. He was trembling and repeating the same words, “that green-green paradise.” First I thought he was praising the beauties of the Princes’ Islands in Istanbul ... but then I realised what that green green paradise meant ...’ (87). She implies that it was the green eyes of the ‘mademoiselle.’ To this, his brother Attar replies that things have changed now; now, the ‘green green paradise’ only represents the beauties of his town for Tüccar Mehmet. The sexual metaphor of the ‘green green paradise’ travels: first representing the beauty of a woman instead of a landscape, but then coming to represent a landscape instead of a woman. However, the persistent and multiplying reference to the metaphor conveys the underlying sexual character of the national discourse in its relation to the West. The real passion is the passion for the European woman whose eyes, which look back at the subject, is the object of desire. Here we see an Occidentalist construction of the national self through the projected eyes of the gendered foreigner, which eroticises the West. Yet, the location of the West is both inside and outside; in other words, the ‘green green paradise’ represents not only an attractive European woman, but also an envied yet decadent experience in Istanbul. Consequently, Tüccar Mehmet is split between the desire for the West (whose space is Istanbul) and the call of the homeland, which has changed to come close to the West, but is not quite like it. The split is cured by the ‘good’ woman (the housewife) who has, in fact, no sexuality (no jealousy, for example) and who understands everything and everybody (and embraces the naughty boy). The metaphor of the ‘green green paradise’ could now safely return home through the mediation of the truth that the Turkish woman embodies. It now symbolises the beautified Turkish town, although its beauty is haunted by the original source of the metaphor. The national identity, after all crises and changes, is vested in the stable figure of the housewife who stands exterior and anterior to the significations of modern national change but who, in her stability, makes change redundant. One Has to Struggle49 I will now turn to another radio drama entitled One Has to Struggle. This family drama written by a woman author engages more deeply with a woman’s character and her problems. Yet, the dramatic action takes place within a logic very similar to the one I have discussed above, which cannot account for changes in the characters of the play and consequently in the national life

174

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

that they signify. Ironically, the concept of struggle, which has strong connotations in terms of the National Struggle, in this context becomes interchangeable with complacency. Let us first look at the characters in the play: Füruzan is a young housewife and a mother. She is sensitive, kind and good-tempered. She attaches great value to her family life, but she is also a modern woman who keeps up with the standards of the new life in her childcare practices. Macit is the young man married to Füruzan. His character is variable. He adopts different traits in different situations throughout the play. While he can be a loving and honest man at times, he is also capable of being careless and selfish, or of being carried away by his lustful urges. The mother-in-law is an elderly woman and the mother of Macit, who lives with the family. She is troublesome. She complains all the time and wears Füruzan out with her bitter comments. She is a traditional woman in many ways, yet she is intrigued by modern life. Fatma is the servant of the house. Her husband is a factory worker. She is not educated, but has common sense. She cannot get along with the mother-in-law but likes Füruzan. Ümit is the little daughter of the family. She is a sensitive child, closer to her mother than to her father. She takes piano lessons and becomes a great pianist. Her name literally means ‘hope.’ Rezzan is a minor character in the play. She is a modern and immoral woman who is involved in extramarital relationships. She admits enjoying these ‘immoral games.’ The aunt also is a minor character, yet she has great influence on the course of events. She is an educated, urban, modern woman. The play starts with the description of a crisis in Füruzan’s life. She sits in the dark living room waiting for her husband, who has developed the habit of going out almost every night. She dreads this, but cannot do much about it. Her feminine insight tells her that there is another woman in Macit’s life. The mother-in-law cruelly teases her about the situation, almost enjoying the possibility that her son, like most other men, has a life elsewhere: Mother-in-law: Look, my daughter, how many times have I told you, but you don’t understand. Don’t keep the dinner table waiting like this, the angels get disturbed ... It is late, he must have eaten somewhere else, in a restaurant or elsewhere. Here we witness a typically traditional comment. The mother-in-law’s traditional stance, in terms of what to expect from a man, is fortified by her superstitious belief about angels. Füruzan keeps quiet and imagines their first days with Macit, when they were lovers. The indexical music of flashback takes us back in time to a romantic conversation in a forest. We hear

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

175

the birds singing as the young couple dreams about marriage. They wish for a suburban house, a bicycle, a fireplace in the house, a radio ... The shared dream depicts an ideal marriage: the things to be owned, the things to do (picnics on weekends, fishing, bicycling, dancing to radio music), the division of labour between the spouses (she will prepare the food, embroider the table clothes, wait for his arrival in the evenings, while he will earn money). The dream also portrays how quarrels should proceed and end lovingly: Macit: Are we going to quarrel, too? Füruzan: I don’t know. Maybe. But is it a must in a marriage? I won’t do anything that upsets you. Macit: I don’t know, maybe we won’t. But I guess quarrels happen in a marriage. Füruzan: Okay, okay, we will quarrel then ... for a change. Macit: But how are we going to make peace? ... Füruzan: ... I will bring your coffee when you are reading your newspaper. Macit: Then I will take the newspaper away to see your face. (She laughs.) When you laugh I will tickle you ... Oh, then we will make love. Strangely, this flashback does not foreshadow the present situation in which Macit has forgotten all his promises. The flashback stands as an appendix that describes the ideal. The only element in the dream that can be linked to the present of the dramatic action is a caged bird. (When Macit mentions a pet bird in a cage in their future home, Füruzan suddenly becomes sad and tells her fiancé that she doesn’t like birds to be caged, she wants them to fly freely.) The author makes no analogy between the figure of the caged bird and Füruzan sitting at home while her husband is having fun, but the analogy forces its way into one’s mind as soon as it is mentioned.50 Moreover, it remains unexplained why Füruzan chooses not to fly away to her freedom, but to remain waiting during the present crisis. When Rezzan calls her late at night to hint that Macit may be having an affair (this is a cruel game to hurt Füruzan, since Rezzan is the woman having an affair with Macit), Füruzan replies serenely: ‘A woman does not lose much by being a little tolerant.’ Macit, on the other hand, does not reflect on the situation. In his secret affair with Rezzan — which is referred to even when they are together in a family setting — he seems passionate. For example, when Rezzan and Macit are alone in the living room while Füruzan is in the kitchen cooking dinner,

176

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

they engage in a highly erotic dialogue. He seems to have forgotten about his family. He does not even respond to the question raised by Rezzan as to whether he sees his wife as a menace. To her question about his relationship with his daughter, he replies that he likes her, but not more than Rezzan. He seems to be in a state of passionate illness (a recurring theme upon which I have touched in the analysis of the previous radio drama), which hinders any reflection on the situation. One day, the aunt comes for a visit. First there is the conversation between the two elderly women, the mother-in-law and the aunt. Although they share the painful symptoms of old age, they do not agree on the interpretation of the present family crisis. The mother-in-law believes that it is only natural for a man to have an extramarital relationship, especially if he is handsome and prosperous — which she thinks her son is, and she is proud of that. The aunt does not believe that all men (should) cheat on their wives, and she mentions her late husband as an example. The mother-in-law, in her typically mean way, replies: ‘Yours must have done it, too. But men walk on snow and never leave a trace.’ This echoes a traditional truism in the women’s world. The aunt then talks to Füruzan. Her advice is simple but sounds novel: Aunt: Men start a marriage, but it is the woman’s role to work for the survival of the marriage. Most of the time, she will have to make sacrifices. A wise woman manages to lead the family out of a crisis. Füruzan: Is it worth it? Aunt: Of course, it is, because you have a child. And your husband is not a man to be easily forsaken ... Trying to forget and forgiving are parts of the honour of womanhood. After all, Macit is your husband. And you also have to think of your child. Füruzan: I wish sometimes that fathers also thought of their children. Aunt: Men are like children. You have to learn to manage them. Füruzan: What is considered shameful for women loses its significance when men do it. Aunt: What can you do about it? It has always been like this. So, don’t busy yourself with these profound questions. And let me tell you that being sad and nervous can be detrimental to your health and beauty. You need strength for your struggle. Füruzan: So one has to do something? Aunt: Yes, to struggle is one of the rights, even duties of a woman ... yes, one of the rights ... Füruzan: To struggle?

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

177

Aunt: Yes, but this struggle should aim for your happiness and salvation ... I will be with you in your struggle. The conversation is significant for the meaning of the word ‘struggle.’ I will return to it. In the dramatic action itself, Füruzan’s struggle is nothing more than her demand to talk with her husband, to talk about everything openly: Füruzan: Can’t you stay home tonight? Macit: No, I have to go. Why? Füruzan: I want to talk with you. Macit: Talk while I am getting ready. Füruzan: I wish you were more understanding. Macit: I don’t get what you are trying to say. What is wrong with going out, meeting a few friends, listening to music somewhere ... Don’t I have the right to live my life? Füruzan: What about me? Don’t I have the right, too? Don’t women and men both have the right? Macit: Either you accept me as I am or ... Füruzan: Be careful, Macit. (We hear the sound of the piano played by Ümit.) If I am staying here, it is only for her. To be a mother means responsibilities ... Tell your lover that the struggle has started. We will all play the game openly now. We as listeners do not know what form the struggle takes in Füruzan’s life. What we know at the end is the happy family reunion. The voice-over tells us that ‘the young woman’s struggle took less time and energy than she initially thought.’ Then the plot skips forward, to ten years after the crisis. Füruzan and Macit are listening to the radio together. On the radio is a live relay of a music festival in Europe where their daughter is performing a classical piece. The parents are extremely happy that their daughter has proven her talent in Europe. Füruzan (crying): That little child makes the world listen to her now ... Thinking that so many people will listen to her music ... I am so happy. Something in me yearns to shout ... shout to the whole world ... this little pianist is my daughter ... she is mine. Macit: Yes, she is a product of yours, your achievement ... You are the most wonderful woman in the world. You are a wonderful woman and a wonderful mother. A woman to adore. I owe everything to you ... my honour, my professional status, and most important of

178

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

all, my daughter’s success, my future to you. You are a heroine ... If it were not for your maturity, we would all be destroyed. If your aunt was alive, she would be proud of you and she would add: ‘A woman who can forgive is a complete woman.’ Füruzan: There are many women who do this. Macit: But you are special and dear to me. There are several definitions of womanhood throughout the play. The basic opposition is between the traditional and the modern woman, represented by the mother-in-law and the aunt. They are types rather than characters with a name. The mother-in-law despises the modern way of life, which comes out in several of her comments about the new methods of child rearing, including taking them to the cinema, the theatre, and the seaside. She assumes an authoritarian position over the other women in the family, over Füruzan and the servant Fatma. She represents an old style of authority, playing the typical role of older women in family life. On the other hand, the aunt represents a new type of authority. She is wise and understanding and practices her authority through communication. She symbolically assumes a role very similar to that of radio. Her authority wins against the traditional one, since her comments have been more influential in the resolution of the crisis. However, a closer look at the content of the controversy makes it apparent that, in fact, the two women are not saying anything different in regard to the crisis. The mother-in-law claims that women should be tolerant; the aunt says that women should struggle. But, according to her, the struggle means that a woman should forgive a man. This is a very interesting substitution. The traditional significance of womanhood is converted into a modern one through a replacement of words. However, the limits of the new are set by the limits of the meaning of struggle, which evokes a new discourse, but also an acceptance of established roles for women. The boundary management that employs the concept of struggle, both through associations with national reforms and their restrained and confined meanings, points to the ambivalence in the national discourse on women. It provides a perfect example for change without change. The play also sets up lessons in modernity: a model of an ideal marriage and child-rearing, with reference to new techniques and objects (such as radio) in everyday life. Yet, the most important lesson concerns crisis management for women. Traditional knowledge, as represented by the motherin-law, for example, is transformed into a modern discourse on how to manage a husband. Here, we see a disembodiment of traditional knowledge that is then processed by the techniques of pedagogy and psychology and

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

179

presented as new. While the role of women is problematised both practically and conceptually, the role of men remains constant in the play. The shifts in Macit’s character are not accounted for. There is no reflection on his oscillation between sexuality and family duties, which are opposed to each other. He shifts from one to the other without any inner contradictions or responsibility for his decisions. Hence, the dynamics of his personality remain unknown. While he is the only person who is really active in the play insofar as he performs actions that change the course of events, there is nothing that allows us to know more about him as an active subject. To the extent that the male subject does not know anything about himself, he is suggestible and led by different women. He is a weakling, a child. (‘All men are like children,’ according to the aunt.) Macit becomes a blind spot in the text. The play defines the contours of the duties and rights of women in modern life. It exhibits dialogical references to other discourses on women, such as feminism (which is evoked by the sentences that stress the equality of men and women), but contains and refutes them in its dramatic action. There are also references to be accepted by the West — the hope that contributes to the resolution of the crisis and that is represented by Ümit’s success in Europe. In fact, the acceptance in the West, by representing the only desirable future, establishes a vantage point through which the past is judged and the present is justified. Yet, the semantic authority of the author cannot account for the blind spots — namely, Füruzan’s close resemblance to a caged bird, or Macit’s lack of knowledge of himself. As the drama tries to walk the tightrobe set by the word ‘struggle,’ it gives unintended or surplus clues for reflection on gender and nationality. The fact that the play was written by a woman manifests itself by delving more deeply into the internal world of women, which remained an untouched subject in many other radio dramas that treated women merely as symbols. Nevertheless, the author speaks about the roles of women from a hegemonic male perspective that informs Occidentalist subjectivity. Both radio dramas I have analysed in this chapter are significant in their restrained character. Contrary to several stage dramas of the period, they avoid collisions and conflicts.51 The final harmony envisioned in their portrayal of gender relations has to be considered in the context of radio broadcasting. The make-believe fantasy of radio, which substitutes sound for the reality of bodies, hints at the role of technology in the Occidentalist boundary management, which goes against the existing divisions in the social and redefines them in the more flexible soundscape of modern national imagination. In these radio dramas, it is possible to detect the significations of stabili-

180

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

ty and change, imagined in terms of dichotomies — man/woman, urban/rural, past/present, Western/Turkish — and connected in imaginative and dramatic ways to the modern national discourse. The dichotomies represented through gendered terms are conceived within the immediate national time on radio. The subjectivity of the elite is conveyed by the Occidentalist fantasy that attempts to simultaneously pose and surpass the dichotomies and justifies change through stability. The change is positioned as external and not normalised, echoing Wallerstein’s insightful comment that ‘change was normal only for the civilized nations, and it therefore was incumbent upon these nations to impose this change upon the recalcitrant other world’ (1991: 20). This supports my previous argument that the Occidentalist fantasy was not a mere fantasy of the Turkish elite. It was in dialogue with what was signified as the model, or the West, and was shaped through adaptations and translations. The model was adopted with constant negotiations of what was desirable as change, and the West always figured as the ultimate audience (and judge) for the performance of change. Radio technology, in this context, provided a Western tool that facilitated the imagination of both the performance of change and the audience that would appreciate it. However, the tool was never perfectly instrumental. These dramas also highlight the splits and gaps in the imagined gendered identities, which cannot be accounted for in terms of the fantasies. Hence, they give clues to help us understand how change and stability was perceived in Occidentalist terms. While change was associated with words and talking (and the Western technology of talking), it was made redundant by the stable figures of women who stood outside the discourse of change. We have seen how the male subjects were not capable of self-reflection in the family dramas. They render themselves children who avoid contradictions and mature sexuality and seek forgiveness and harmony in the mythical mother figure of the woman, who signifies national virtue. In general terms, we can say that the male elite, who could not come to grips with reality in their efforts to imagine and create the modern nation, resorted to an all-encompassing mother figure. The male figure of power can only resist evil and temptation — impersonated by immoral Westernised women — by turning himself into a child. The deployment of women as unchanging and tolerant mothers provides a ground for embedding men torn between eroticised Western-ness and national duty. On the other hand, idealised motherhood becomes the norm for women, for assuming their modern national role as the managers of the house.52 Imagining the modern nation in Turkey was premised upon the dis-

RADIO DRAMA: FAMILIARISING THE MODERN NATION

181

avowal of both the historical past and the present. The Occidentalist fantasy articulated itself by supposing an origin anterior to present time and social change, which was symbolised in the mother figure. Psychoanalytically, this denotes the narcissistic illusions of the elite — based on the denial of any undesirable differences with the West, and also on the denial of the paternal significance of the past regime.53 Radio voices, in this context, experimented with the instruments of the modern, (Western) technology, to stage the modern nation. Simultaneously, the fantasy work undermined by the pale, naive images fails to construct a reality of their own accord. Hence, the elite sought shelter in eternal origins. They attempted to ground their projections of a Westernised truth in the ‘essential’ truth of the mother,54 which remained stable but could not be easily reconciled with the official national discourse that conveyed a desire for change. The tension between stability and change, as well the tension between the displayed and the ‘essential’ truth has been the very site of the Occidentalist performance of power in Turkey.

Cover page. Radyo, vol.1, no.4, 15 March 1942.

7 CONCLUSION: FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON OCCIDENTALIST HEGEMONY

A place on the map is also a place in history. Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’

I have argued in the previous chapters that every attempt to define, build and demarcate modern-national Turkish identity on radio was shaped in reference to an imagined Western-ness and for the Western gaze. This constitutes a field within which the fantasy of Occidentalism can be traced. Furthermore, the West had shifting meanings, both inside and outside. While in different contexts Europe or the USA became markers of the West; becoming Western was also associated with certain regions and groups in society and, thus, utilised to give meaning to a set of binaries, most prominently formulated as authentic/artificial and culture/civilisation. Radio technology provided the means to produce and sustain the position of the elite as boundary managers. I have attended to various aspects of radio broadcasting in early Turkish history and the BBC Turkish Service to demonstrate several instances of these processes, particularly by examining the audio significations of modern national identity on radio, with reference to the complex interplay between external and internal truths manifested in statements and practices. The analysis reveals a series of problematic areas that are worthy of further research and reflection. First of all, my analysis has involved a contrast of voice and vision. The contrast is significant due to the often cited and criticised equation of the West with voice and the East with silence (Moore-Gilbert 1997: 104).

184

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Paradoxically, Occidentalism manifested itself in the very act of talking of what Said calls the ‘silent Other.’1 The Turkish elite imagined that, by talking on radio, they could build a unified nation in the idealised image of Western civilisation, and be both heard and seen by the projected West. Civilisation was operationalised in terms of the technological means that made talking and its dissemination possible and was contrasted to nature — the essence of Turkish-ness — mainly associated with women. As I have discussed in reference to radio talks and radio dramas in Chapters Five and Six, women represented stability, as opposed to change, which was technological and external. However, the emphasis on voice does not simply represent a coming to voice of the subaltern. Nor is voice, as Göçek and Balaghi have argued, directly connected to the experience of the subject by giving advantage to ‘the text of the subject over that of the interpreter’ (1994: 1). To the extent that Turkish Radio assigned to itself the task of governing the masses, educating and shaping their conduct in the newly emerging national life, radio broadcasting actively took part, or at least presumed to take part, in the consolidation of an authoritarian power regime in Turkey, which paradoxically silenced a large proportion of the population. Therefore, the sound images of modern national identity and the technological embodiment and disembodiment of people’s cultures that could be observed, for example, in the creation of the genre of folk music or of sound effects, which I have discussed in Chapters Three and Six, disrupt the binary of the Orient/Occident. In other words, Turkish Radio’s complicity with and its positioning in a highly centralised and non-democratic power regime complicates its representative status as being simply the Other of the West. The Orient that figures in Said’s Orientalism as a constructed and unified Other appears in this context as a site of struggle which does not only challenge, displace and modify the hegemony of the West by its own practices, but re-affirms its hegemonic idioms to generate Others within a certain regime of power. Thus, one problem on which this book centres, but which needs further reflection, is the constitution of hegemony through Occidentalism. My research has focused on a period when the concern to join the Western civilisation and, at the same time, to create a distinct Turkish identity was most intense. Yet, as I have shown, the reality that could not be signified within the Occidentalist fantasy continued to be a disturbing factor for the national elite. The gap between the truth of the Western gaze and the inner truth — implying the phoniness of the former — was made more evident by radio broadcasting which operated with sound images and produced immaterial effects that aimed to replace the particular problems that could be

CONCLUSION

185

observed in society. Thus, the interplay between explicit and inner truths provided a fertile ground for the constant renewal of the Occidentalist fantasy. This I would claim to be the very site for the production of hegemony in Turkey, despite the ambiguity and fluidity of its operations. The Gramscian conception of hegemony proposes that we look at power in terms of the production of consent, and not only of coercion. Although the Turkish state is infamous for its practices of coercion and violence in many instances in its history — such as the military take-overs and the long record of human rights violations, which still figure as major obstacles to full membership in the European Union — one could point to a field of hegemony that produces consent and the general identity of Turkish-ness. However, it would be misleading to locate the dynamics of hegemony either within the ideology of so-called nationalism (or nativisim against the West) or Westernism in Turkey. Instead, the impact of implicit Western colonialism and the complex terrain of responses to it should be considered. The trope of the bridge reveals several significant symptoms of that particular terrain. Understanding the Occidentalist dynamics of hegemony is important since Turkey as a bridge fails to fit into a neat category of either belonging to the East or the West and has remained mostly invisible in the studies of colonialism and post-colonialism due its status as an exceptional case. As I have argued in the introduction, the Turkish case has mostly attracted the attention of modernisation theorists, and not of post-colonial critics. The primary reason for its invisibility derives from the idea that Turkey was Westernised without being colonised.2 In that respect, the Turkish case may come close to what Michael Herzfeld has called a ‘crypto-colony’ (2002). According to Herzfeld, ‘crypto-colonialism’ can be defined as ‘the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this relationship being articulated in the iconic guise of aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models’ (2002: 900-1). Herzfeld points to Greece as a significant example. Although Turkey shared a similar fate in becoming a modern nation, most probably due to its Ottoman heritage of being, if not a coloniser, certainly an imperial power, Turkey is not classified under ‘crypto-colonialism.’ However, the most significant difference that demarcates Turkey as an isolated case or as exception should be sought in its relation to the past. According to Herzfeld, one feature that all these countries (crypto-colonies) share is ‘the aggressive promotion of their claims to civilizational superiority or antiquity, claims that almost always appear disproportionate to their political influence’ (2002: 902). Yet, the historical condition of Turkey’s

186

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

modernisation has been the denial, or, in better terms, the foreclosure of the Ottoman past (as the Orient par excellence). Furthermore, the Ottoman past, albeit contested and negotiated in different ways in the history of the Turkish Republic,3 has been primarily labelled by the Western-oriented Turkish modernisers as ‘sick’ and ‘corrupt.’ While Greece could imagine its modern identity as anterior to European civilisation, in Turkey Western civilisation was always positioned as a desired target for the future, yet never free of distanced, foreign and threatening connotations. The easy celebration of Turkey’s voluntary amnesia in relation to its Oriental past and, consequently, its modernizing potential, or the neglect of the particular historical effects of colonialism in Turkey erect an invisible barrier against questioning what is taken for granted and designated as Western modernity. I would like to emphasise the material, discursive and psychological aspects of the production of a replica in Turkey, as well as the intricate connections between the original and the replica, or the model and the copy, by further dwelling on the question of Occidentalism and hegemony. This is important in the face of persistent theories that still argue for independent histories of the West and the Orient in a civilisational paradigm,4 or a synthesis of the two in Turkey, as if the constituents of being Western or Oriental are independent and movable elements in history.5 The Occidentalist fantasy is evoked through a performative discourse that produces practices answering to a projected West; these contribute to a form of government of the domestic population, warding off those ‘inferior Others’ defined by ethnic, regional, class and gender divisions in Turkey. I have focused on the idea that the Occidentalism that manifested itself in the specific conditions of radio broadcasting was itself instrumental in imagining a modern form of government, as well as defining the identity of the elite and the masses. Westernisation in Turkey has been a trope within which new ways of addressing and managing the population were created, in addition to the actual employment of Western artefacts. Yet, the modern form of government envisaged by the Turkish elite and particularly practiced by Turkish radio diverged in many respects from Western cases, in terms of the manufacturing and manifestation of truth as demonstrated in Chapter Four on the BBC Turkish Service. The truth manufactured by the BBC, although itself based on a play of force lines,6 was taken to be a historically legitimised natural truth, while the Turkish broadcasters were in a position of negotiating various truths, having to foreclose certain parts of their history and memory, which led to an apparent split in the manifestation of what was called the truth of modern Turkish nationality. Furthermore, the Western audience found Turkish modernity always lack-

CONCLUSION

187

ing the ‘real thing,’ as can be seen in Bernard Lewis’s distinction between desirable inward and problematic outward modernisation.7 I find the divergence critical, not to reproduce and stabilise the difference between the two cases, but to understand the conditions of the regime of truth(s) and hegemony in Turkey as a bridge. If we can adapt Deleuze’s statement that ‘the logic of a thought (pensée) is the set of crises it goes through’ (cited in Rajchmann 1991: 5) to history, then I would argue that the logic of hegemony is best understood through its crises in history. In other words, not only what is sedimented and reified as history is reactivated when exposed to a crisis in the hegemony, but hegemony is also re-affirmed by resolving that particular crisis. History bears on the present hegemony through the medium of culture as a residue that survived past conflicts through a myriad of strategies and tactics. I have discussed in this book that there was a set of crises involving the use of technologies, particularly radio broadcasting, in the early years of the Turkish Republic. These give clues to the formation of the cultural environment of persisting Occidentalist hegemony. As we have seen, technologies were not neutral; they incorporated a certain vision of social relations. Technological imagination is a form of subjectivity or self-conception constituted by a socially mediated interaction with tools and instruments. What was at stake, for example, in the Turkish broadcasters’ interaction with microphones was not a direct and unmediated link with a technological apparatus. The microphone linked the body to the world, while at the same time translating it into a new codification of voice and language. Speaking to the microphone was reckoned to be a new discipline, which had to be taught to the broadcasters. In the age of radio, a new radio language had to be crafted, and for this Western examples were usually taken as models.8 The new language that was developed, modified and problematised for and on radio also altered the meaning of the speaking subject and his/her addressee. Speaking to the world implied speaking to a mass of people. This clearly refers to the idea of mass communication, through which a totalisation of the audience occurs. The totalisation of the audience through radio enhanced the notion of the nation as a unified and homogeneous entity. However, in my view, this was not the most striking feature of national radio broadcasting. Radio broadcasting addresses all and each at the same time; it both totalises and individualises the audience.9 There lay the roots of a significant crisis in early Turkish radio broadcasting. The technological imagination contradicted what was evidently visible in social life. The technological imagination that radio broadcasting availed to its speaking subjects —

188

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

speaking to the world and speaking to all and each — was constantly interrupted by the avoidance of communication with certain groups in society. Both verbal and music programmes on Turkish radio were geared to address an imaginary audience modelled on the idea of a Westernised society and avoided a realistic portrayal of the complexity of the history and culture of the people, as well as the cultural heritage of the Ottoman past. The representation of the people as a nation on radio was deliberately based on fiction rather than documentation, in contrast, for example, to the contemporary broadcasts of the BBC. In parallel with this emphasis on fiction, the practice of carrying out audience surveys never assumed any significance for Turkish broadcasters, while it aided the BBC to build up a representative fantasy of all and each of the audience, which could be taken as reality. In Turkey, the technological imagination inhered in and produced by radio broadcasting could clash with experienced reality and was self-consciously regarded as a source of disturbance. The fantasy of true communication that provided a basis for understanding Western societies was already disrupted in the Turkish case.10 The problem that manifested itself in Turkish radio broadcasting can be considered in connection to my previous point regarding how a particular culture aids hegemony. I find fierif Mardin’s statements (1991) that dwell on the split between social fantasy and reality in early Turkish history very significant in this regard, for enabling us to understand the problem of communication in this context. While other scholars of Turkish nationalism often confined their object of analysis merely to the texts of the official nationalist discourse, Mardin diagnosed a problem of modern communication as a specific link between technologies, statements and practices in Turkey. Inspired by a Weberian approach, Mardin has taken communication to be the total of instruments — political, economic and social — that makes the government of a group of people possible. ‘A new business ethic, organisational reforms and the market network can be regarded as a cumulative of the means of communication, which establishes and promotes the continuity of autonomous mechanisms of rational capitalism’ (1991: 202). His conclusion is that this operational network had not been established in Turkey. Although I share Mardin’s diagnosis, I would disagree with his comparison with the Western model and the conclusion he has drawn from it. I contend that the problem of communication occurred not because Turkey lacked a rational network of communication, but because of the differing yet interconnected register of truths I have tried to elucidate above. Occidentalism upholds both a system of rational communication and the

CONCLUSION

189

culture that undermines it. It must be evident by now that the Turkish government never regarded the population as an autonomous force. The people were seen as something to be molded, as passive objects, with no dynamics of their own. To put it in other terms, the dynamics of the population were contrasted with the ideal of Western civilisation and reckoned to be threatening if the ideal were to be realised in practice. For example, the People’s Houses, although based on the idea of the autonomy of the people, in practice shied away from entrusting the government of individuals and localities to them. This led to the failure of the People’s Houses as efficient instruments of modern government, which was partly acknowledged by the Kemalists themselves.11 However, to simply describe Turkish government in terms of monopolised and centralised sovereignty would mean to overlook the crises of government in terms of communication. An example given by Mardin illustrates an extreme situation in which the ideal or fantasy went against reality. The adoption of the Latin script together with the Turkification of language in such a short time, led to a crisis in schools in the 1940s, where not only the students but also the teachers could not read and understand the new schoolbooks. However, says Mardin, the education went on as if they could use the book as an instrument for education (1990: 210). The communication in this context paradoxically meant the blocking of communication. For Mardin, this unreal, fairy-tale-like situation was nothing but the absence of efficiency and meaning. Even the bureaucrats who ordered these books to be published did not believe that they would be efficient, but acted as if they would. ‘Although no one believed in what they did,’ the series of actions continued. To me, the resulting absurdity appears as a surplus rather than a lack, as Mardin understands it. The seemingly irrational ‘as if’ condition points to the operation of the Occidentalist fantasy. But it is more than that. In order to uphold the ‘as if’ condition, people had to perform in a certain way, by learning how to demarcate the truth on display and the truth that is intimate. The willingness to operate under these conditions as a way of sharing culture constructed a hegemonic grammar of performance. This could be interpreted as a very different form of normalisation of power compared to the Western fantasy of rational communication, albeit structured by its dominance as a model. Thus we could say that, on the one hand, Occidentalist fantasy plays a pivotal role in maintaining the limits and forms of the ‘sayable’ (Foucault 1991a) for the Western gaze. On the other hand, what cannot be explicitly revealed and remains unspoken continues to contest the limits of the ‘sayable’ in practice. Therefore, I have argued in Chapter Two that the methodology that Foucault has chosen to pursue — the study of explicit

190

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

programmes for the analysis of discourses (1991a) — is not wholly applicable to the Turkish case where the explicit was in a dialogic link with the intimate inner truth. This is why I have introduced psychoanalytical concepts to account for the surplus. What appears as excess and meaningless and even irrational in comparison to the dominant Western codes should be acknowledged in assessing the realm of the Other. As Adam Phillips has put it, ‘[i]f the aim of a system is to create an outside where you can put the things you don’t want, then we have to look at what that system disposes of — its rubbish — to understand it, to get a picture of how it sees itself and wants to be seen’ (1995: 19). I would argue in a similar vein that the surplus continues to substantiate the hegemonic culture in Turkey. The historically shaped culture, when considered in these terms, bears ‘dangerous memories’ (Ostovich 2002). This is why I find it important to look briefly at some current moments in today’s Turkey in which the excesses of history unregistered in dominant historical narratives are revealed. The assassination of the prominent and popular Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink on 19 January 2007 was one tragic event, significant for exploding the continuum of history and making the debris of past crises in Turkey surface. This event was a turning point for diagnosing the now evident division of Turkish society. The national/modern fantasy that ruled by foreclosing the Ottoman past and especially the violent historical conflicts with the non-Muslim populations was dealt a major blow. However, the crisis was not only because a Turkish-Armenian could be so easily killed on a busy street during daytime, but also because his murder triggered an unexpectedly large crowd to rally. More than 200,000 people walked at his funeral, silently carrying posters that read: ‘We are all Armenians.’ Soon thereafter, the direct participation and complicity of several high-level police and gendarmerie officers in the assassination were revealed. Yet, the popular reactions to the assassination were divided: While some accused the government and the state, others joined in the growing nationalist backlash, claiming that Turkish nationalism was undergoing an ordeal.12 There were even a group of people who openly identified with the murderer, carrying, for example, banners in football matches that read: ‘We are all Ogün Samasts’ (the name of the alleged murderer of Hrant Dink). The foreclosed history became a battleground, dividing society on the fragile boundaries of the ‘nationalist heritage.’ The battle led to violent clashes over the issue of identity on all fronts. The unsettled questions of the past, for example, concerning ‘the Kurdish question,’13 or the ‘the headscarf question,’14 increasingly continue to produce big cracks in the constitutive principles of the supposedly ethnically homogeneous and secular (laique) Turkey.

CONCLUSION

191

We see in this crisis-ridden political climate of contemporary Turkey that nationalism and modernity, once defined through the prism of the ruling elite in the Turkish project of Westernisation, are being decoupled. Multiple nationalisms and modernities have appeared in the political arena. Nationalism is still deployed to justify political actions, yet with varying and often contradictory meanings.15 As nationalisms proliferate, the concept of modernity is becoming even more vague. The meanings of modernity are increasingly localised and specific, substantiated by different actors in varying contexts, defined by class, gender, ethnicity and, furthermore, by religious or otherwise life-style-related practices. The struggles of identity — be it Kurdish, Alevi, Laz, or gay/lesbian — are also more audible in Turkey’s soundscape, as there are today several private and local radio stations besides the many television channels. Furthermore, not only the constitutive principles of homogeneity, but also the unified national territory that signifies modern Turkey are in question. If the Kurdish claims to a separate identity have destabilised the territorial boundaries, interestingly several groups, including a few ‘progressive’ intellectuals, evoke imperial visions that attempt to re-enchant the idea of Ottoman imperial power.16 Moreover, modernity no longer directly refers to Europe. Although the channels for EU funding for several civil society projects are now well-established in Turkey, and although occasionally conferences are held addressing the topic of accession to the EU, Europe is moving farther away from the political imaginary in Turkey,17 leaving behind a worn-out code of (Western) civilisation. However, in my argument the present divisions in Turkish political life should not be merely read as symptoms of, for example, culturally constructed ‘alternative modernities’ (Göle 2000a); instead, I would argue that the modern nation continues to be the superaddressee through its historical associations with Western civilisation, through which the contested hegemony is continually being reproduced and sustained. In this framework, conflicting ideologies and actions are still allotted meanings and justifications, by utilising the residual historical repertoire of Occidentalist culture. In other words, Occidentalism continues to generate resources for new hegemonic performances. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo¤an’s 2008 address to the Turkish youth is illuminating in this respect, evoking the old conceptual frame of ‘culture/civilisation.’ Erdo¤an said that ‘unfortunately we have taken the immorality of the West, which goes against our values, instead of taking its science and knowledge.’18 Erdo¤an particularly cited the words of Mehmet Akif Ersoy, the poet who wrote the lyrics of the Turkish national anthem, in order to emphasise the division between the desired Western arts, science

192

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

and knowledge, and the undesired Western immorality. He also replicated the concern of the founding fathers of the Turkish nation, by pointing to the necessity of speed in the race of civilisation. Erdo¤an’s speech is significant not because it demonstrates an ideological continuum in Turkish nationalism. On the contrary, the rupture in the republican ideology that Erdo¤an and his party represent (in terms of utilising Islam as a political force which had been repressed before) makes his words more striking. Despite the cracks in the once unifying ideology of Kemalism and nationalism in today’s Turkey, as briefly discussed above, the performative formula of Occidentalism still retains its centrality for establishing hegemony. There is an appeal to the consent of the majority on the very basis of the need to synthesise the Occident and the Orient. However, it is very important to note that the term ‘hegemonic’ is not only about the construction of consent and normality. Hegemony also means the policing of the boundaries, so that the traversing of these boundaries entails various judgments, even punishments, as Judith Butler reminds us (in Bell 1999). The emphasis on ‘our values’ in the Occidentalist formula, which also figures centrally in Erdo¤an’s speech, refers to the fantasy of sovereignty that claims the right to decide not only the proportions of the synthesis, but also ‘the exception,’ as Carl Schmitt would say (Schmitt 2006). Practically, it is a means of marking certain segments of society as immoral and, consequently, beyond the borders of recognition, since they are associated either with an undesirable Oriental-ness in some cases, or with threatening Western-ness in others. There is no need to say that the question of the ‘so-called Armenian genocide’ as the official ideology would say, or the Kurdish issue have both been connected to Western aims of dividing and colonising Turkey. Thus, while on the one hand the notion of speed defines the urge to take Western arts, sciences and knowledge and legitimises contemporary neo-liberal technologies and policies in Turkey, in line with the global re-structuring of capital, on the other hand, ‘our values’ that cannot be judged by any external criteria consolidate the realm of intimacy as the cultural (and unquestioned) source of power and government. Yet, the cultural (‘our values’) is not the essence of Turkey, as the elite would like to assert, but rises upon the historical residue composed of various negotiations and sedimented in affects and memories of resentment (not altogether independent of guilt) against the Others within, and also against Western superiority or its implicit colonialism. In this context, the Occidentalist culture that informs performances — in all its ambiguity, heterogeneity, yet continuity — appears as the invisible hand of hegemony that interweaves the desire and the resistance to be Western.

CONCLUSION

193

One can argue, then, that Occidentalist culture mediated in and through Western technologies breeds political subjectivities capable of distinguishing what is for display and what belongs to ‘us,’ very similar to colonial settings where people had to learn what was ‘true’ and what was ‘right.’19 The accepting of Western sciences or technologies in Turkey cannot be judged merely as indexes of civilisation; they should be viewed in the light of the culture which they both produce and in which they are immersed. If the modern political imagination in Turkey has been articulated in explicit policies and programmes, other techniques of government have rested on strategies and tactics that bypassed them. ‘The “mystery and authority” that Dostoevsky once saw as the clues to power’ (cited in Boym 2001: 99) sensualise the power regime. Power is mystified and sensualised by making its claims hegemonically shared through the acculturation of intimate codes of interpretation.20 We have seen how even the most rational BBC invested in the ambiguous field of Turkish sentiments in Chapter Four. The sensualisation of power needs further reflection, which I cannot possibly develop here. However, the gendered nature of radio broadcasting is worth re-visiting in my concluding comments in order to dwell on several points that make gender central to the sensualisation of power. Turkey was not at all exceptional in its attempts to regulate gender identities in relation to the stakes of national modernity. The re-definition of family as a nationally essential unit and the new roles of woman and man positioned in the modern family in a heterosexual paradigm bear striking resemblances to many other cases, as accounted by historians and sociologists. Furthermore, as in most non-Western contexts, the ‘status of women in society was the popular barometer of “civilization”’ (Jayawardena 1986: 12). Sheila Hannah Katz, in the context of Palestine under British mandate, made the connection with colonialism explicit when she said: ‘Education, freedom of movement and monogamy became hallmarks of “civilized” modernity. The “New Man” needed a “New Woman” to be presentable in colonialist circles, rather than secluded, veiled or illiterate. Modernization would tolerate no more bound feet or bound minds. British, Arab and Zionist leaders all gave their attention to the process of “modernizing” women as a measure of the legitimacy of their power in Palestine’ (1996: 93, emphasis added). What makes the Turkish context appear different is the implicit and indeed invisible colonisation. It appears that Turkish men and women had to internalise the new codes of civilisation, just for the sake of civilisation, which nevertheless was pragmatically connected to the claims of the legitimacy of power in the eyes of the West. Yet, not only women but also men, to a certain extent, had to perform ‘as if’ they were modern; for example, women

194

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

had to learn to be ‘modern yet modest’ (Kandiyoti 1993), which clearly illustrates the split between display and essence. Radio broadcasting was one medium, among others, to convey the new content of the desirable and civilised roles for men and women, most prominently as father and mother. Radio programmes taught new forms of conduct for bodies and emotions. But radio broadcasting also produced sensualities regarding the maternal voice, as a mother to all. This was positioned as the naturalised essence of the nation, which needed the unchanging figure of the mother, while at the same time blindly jumping into the abyss of civilisation. Although I have not dealt with audience reception in this book, I would like to give two examples of how radio broadcasting created sensual effects with its maternal voice of power that talked to everybody, that was disembodied, and that triggered sensual responses without altering the material conditions of life. It is extremely interesting that the significance of the public address on the radio was turned into a question for debate in the journal Yeni Adam in the 1940s. The question was: ‘Do you approve of the personalised style of address, such as greetings directed to an invisible, unknown public on the radio?’21 The replies from the readers varied; several were against it, thinking it was insincere, while others approved, arguing that it was part of civilised behaviour. But one reply from Sivas, a rural Anatolian town, bore an important hint regarding the significance of public address on radio. The respondent said: ‘Hearing a good night greeting from Ankara, the centre of the state, in a far away town gives one pleasure and peace.’22 The second example comes from a letter written by the father of a radio presenter, published in the radio journal: ‘My son: I have not experienced such a longing before! ... You are not with us; but we hear your voice. Normally, I should not be missing you. But I cannot help it. I will never forgive the tricks this wonderful invention of science plays on human emotions ... You have become a dream. But a dream made only of voice ... I could not simply call it being apart. It is not longing as we know it ... This is a modern longing ... I don’t how to put it!’23 These are just a few reasons to think that early radio broadcasting, which was regarded as a failure in its actual effects by its critics in Turkey, was nevertheless essential in provoking modern longings, as well as teaching the people to handle dreams and reality differently. Occidentalism on radio was mediated through gendered imaginings within the family and, in turn, gave families a new sensuality for the operations of modern power. This is why radio deserves its unique position in the construction and reconstruction of an Occidentalist fantasy within the hegemonic culture of power in Turkey.

CONCLUSION

195

However, Occidentalism has trapped and imprisoned the political imagination in Turkey in a game of display/intimacy, in what seems to be an eternal dilemma between the Occident and the Orient. I hope that the account of early Turkish radio in this book helps to open a space for new narratives of historical experiences that have been, and continue to be, silenced.

NOTES

Chapter One 1 Naz›m Hikmet (2002). Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse, trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, New York: Persea Books. 2 Jonathan Sterne has argued that, although many scholars have considered seeing as the privileged sense of modernity, the sense of hearing has also its modern yet neglected history, which in some cases even ‘prefigured modern ways of seeing’ (2003: 3). 3 Kultur Austausch Online, 1/2005. 4 Hanafi has argued that ‘Occidentalism defends national character, national culture and national life-style; it is a popular culture set against the elitism of Orientalism; an ideology for the ruled as opposed to the ideology of the ruler; a liberating device, similar to liberation theology, set against the dogma of the church.’ Kultur Austausch Online, 1/2005. 5 I have addressed the significance of the temporal difference between the model and the copy specifically in Turkey’s relations with the European Union elsewhere (Ah›ska 2003). 6 See Grosrichard (1998) and J. Parla (1985) who provide rich historical accounts of how the Ottoman Empire was constructed as the object of Orientalism. 7 Gellner has also argued in the 1960s that ‘nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’ (1964: 169). However, Gellner’s primary emphasis was not on the process of invention itself, but on the ‘necessary and thoroughly functional response to the Great Transformation from static agrarian society to the world of industry and mechanical communication’ (Anderson 1996: 10). The scope of nationalism as a political phenomenon was extended by Anderson’s work, since it attends to the relation between a transformation in consciousness and sociological and historical factors, thus extending the limits of the political. 8 Anderson primarily referred to print. However, he also makes reference to radio technology: ‘Invented only in 1895, radio made it possible to bypass print and summon into being an aural representation of the imagined community where the printed page scarcely penetrated. Its role in the Vietnamese and Indonesian revolutions, and generally in mid-twentieth-century nationalisms, has been much underestimated and understudied’ (1991: 54). 9 Anderson has pointed to the affinity of national imagining to religious imagining and argued that the idea of the nation had to replace religious belief, as a

198

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

‘secular transformation of fatality into continuity’ (1991: 10-1). 10 Anderson has argued, with Hobsbawm, that the French Revolution was turned into a ‘thing’ through print media: ‘The experience was shaped by millions of printed words into a “concept” on the printed page, and in due course, into a model’ (1991: 80). 11 According to Anderson, the new print media dethroned the somewhat official language of the empire, namely the Ottoman one, while it gave prominence to the vernacular languages with the newly appearing daily newspapers. The first newspaper was founded by Ibrahim fiinasi, who had been trained in France; later, others followed him. What Anderson misses here is that most of these newspapers belonged to ‘foreigners,’ as mentioned by a Turkish scholar of communication. Korkmaz Alemdar has said that the first newspapers were those published by Westerners with the aim of tutoring the Ottoman government: Le Progres d’Orient, Levant times, and Le Stamboul were some of them (1996: 17). Orientalism was at work through print. 12 Homi Bhabha has also criticised Anderson for failing to hear the ‘subaltern voice of the people that speaks betwixt and between times and places’ (1990: 309). He has argued that ‘[t]he space of the arbitrary sign, its separation of language and reality, enables Anderson to stress the imaginary or mythical nature of the society of the nation. However, the differential time of the arbitrary sign is neither synchronous nor serial. In the separation of language and reality — in the process of signification — there is no epistemological equivalence of subject and object, no possibility of the mimesis of the meaning’ (1990: 308-9). 13 Chatterjee said in a recent interview that post-colonial nationalist movements ‘really sought to create a European style or Western style modern state, based on very similar constitutional principles, very similar technologies of administration, and simply to replace the personnel,’ as he had previously depicted in Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World (1993a). www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/chatterwee_print.html. He continued that he has shifted his analysis in the last years from the big framework to look at different and most often exceptional local practices, through which he advances his arguments on ‘politics of the governed’ (2004) and attends to questions of technology in terms of governance. 14 Pheng Cheah has critically discussed questions of the post-colonial nation and post-colonial theories within the framework of community/state; organic/artificial; physis/techne; and life and death. According to Cheah, both Anderson and Chatterjee’s theories are wrapped in these dichotomies, and for these authors the technical becomes a source of perversion and death when it cannot be organicised (Cheah 1999). 15 Schelesinger complemented Benedict Anderson’s argument by stressing the need to ‘take account of later, post-Gutenberg media technologies and try to examine their implications for the consciousness of nationhood’ (1991: 164). 16 The idea is most evident in Ziya Gökalp’s writings, which provide rich sources for Turkish nationalism. Gökalp, who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, argued that culture and civilisation were two different orders, the former consisting of necessary and essential ties, and the latter of voluntary adaptations of knowledge and technique. He said: ‘The Turkists will succeed because they want to leave the Eastern civilisation, which is Byzantine, and take the

NOTES

17

18

19 20 21 22

23

24

25

199

Western civilisation. The Turkists are those who want to remain Turkish and Muslim yet are willing to enter into the Western civilisation with no reservations’ (Gökalp 1994: 39). Kemalists embraced this distinction between culture and civilisation after the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 to guide their modernising and nationalising reforms. For some recently published significant studies on the various aspects and issues pertaining to the construction of the nation in Turkey, see Akçam 2004; Alt›nay 2004; A. Aktar 2006; Ayd›n 1993; Bora 2003; Bozdo¤an 2001; Bozdo¤an and Kasaba 1997; Ersanl›-Behar 1992; Göle 1997a; Heper, Kramer and Öncü 1993; Kad›o¤lu 1996; Kandiyoti 1993, 1997a, 1997b; Keyder 1987, 2003; Keyder and Frangoudaki 2007; Keyman 2007; Keyman and ‹çduygu 2005; Maksudyan 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Öztürkmen 1998; Özyürek 2006; T. Parla 1985; T. Parla and A. Davison 2004; Sirman 2005; Yavuz 2003; Ye¤en 1999, 2007. One of the most resourceful studies on nationalism as a project belongs to Ayfle Kad›o¤lu. She has argued that Turkish national identity ‘was distinguished by its manufactured character’ (1996: 188). Due to the dominance of social engineering, ‘the Enlightenment, which was experienced as a process in the West was transformed into a project in Turkey. One of the building blocks of this project has been the politics of laicisisation led by the Republican elites’ (Kad›o¤lu 1999 : 27, emphasis added). Ça¤lar Keyder has argued that ‘Turkish nationalism is an extreme example of a situation in which the masses remained silent partners and the modernizing elite did not attempt to accommodate popular resentment’ (1997: 43). As Edward Said has argued, Orientalism constructed the Orient with no corresponding equivalent in the Orient, by denying its historicity (1995). Daniel Lerner (1958) and Bernard Lewis (1968) can be cited as significant examples. Anthony Smith refers to Lerner’s book (1958) to illustrate the link between modernisation and communication: ‘Modernization theorists who stress the crucial role of “communications” and a “communications revolution” have found in this approach a useful tool for analyzing the political changes in societies newly exposed to the impact of the West. Modern Turkey provides a typical case-study of this “communications revolution”’ (1983: 89). ‘Turkey today stands before important choices. It may choose, as some of its leaders would clearly prefer, to turn its back on the West and return to the Middle East, this time not leading but following, in a direction determined by others. It may choose, as other Turkish leaders would clearly prefer, to tighten its ties with the West and turn its back on the Middle East, except for those countries that share Turkey’s westward orientation and democratic aspirations’ (B. Lewis 1997: 48). I would say that the idea/object of ‘the real thing’ is at the core of every oppressive ideology. As critical theorists have argued (Adorno 2003), the language of authenticity shares with fascism its claims to represent purity as opposed to ‘dangerous’ hybridity. Walter Benjamin diagnosed a certain democratic tendency in the dissolution of ‘aura’ — the real thing — in the age of mechanical reproduction (1968). Occidentalism attempts to manufacture the aura where it does not exist, yet with the painful half-awareness that it is not ‘the real thing.’ Deniz Kandiyoti in her important analyses of gender and Turkish nationalism

200

26

27 28

29

30

31

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY has also pointed to a similar problem: ‘revolving around two opposed narratives — two sides of the same discursive coin’ brings us ‘full circle to positing notions of lost authentic “indigeneity” and inviting forms of neo-Orientalism that are inimical to an understanding of complex historical processes’ (1997a: 114). The term ‘elite’ is used throughout the book not to mean necessarily a coherent group with an ideological consensus, as the word ‘Kemalist’ would imply in Turkey. I also do not use it as an equivalent of the ruling class or bourgeoisie. What I want to emphasise more than ideological unity or a given common interest are the newly emerging social positions within the nationalisation/modernisation process, which are embraced by individuals who possess a certain cultural and social capital that easily converts to economic capital. In a country where Occidantalism is a hegemonic fantasy, the people educated in Western languages and/or ways of life could assume the position of building, educating and representing the nation, distinguishing themselves from the ‘uneducated masses.’ We will see examples of the distinct subjectivity produced in this frame in the following chapters. Despite my cultural emphasis, I should add that the elite was also structurally shaped, being composed mostly of the middle class, Turkish and male members. Orhan Koçak has argued that the ‘internationalisation’ of Turkey was an escape from East to West in order to guard against “Arabicization/Calibanization”’ (1995: 239). ‘Europe has the privilege of being the good example, for it incarnates in its purity the Telos of all historicity: universality, omnitemporality, infinite traditonality, and so forth; ... The empirical types of non-European societies, then, are only more or less historical; at the lower limit, they tend toward nonhistoricity’ (1992: 115). Among the many instances in which the bridge was employed in various discourses, a Turkish writer’s reference to August Comte is significant to show how this metaphor is proudly embraced by the Turkish. In the 1830s, August Comte wrote to the Grand Vizier Reflit Pafla, stating the need of a synthesis between the worlds, Asia and Europe, which had been separated for centuries. Comte believed that there must be a common civilisation in the world and ‘regarded Turkey as the only country with the capacity, in historical and geographical terms’ to realise this (Kaplan 1967: 73). For example, one can read on the back cover of a recent tourist guide on Turkey, that ‘Turkey is famous as a link between the East and the West and for its rich and cosmopolitan culture, resulting from the expansive influence of the Ottoman Empire’ (2007). The ambivalence as to where Turkey fits in the world can be clearly observed in the writings of Western visitors to the Ottoman Empire. In 1854, in a book called Turkey, its History and Progress, etc., Sir George Larpent wrote that Turks ‘have shown themselves worthy of our support and assistance; they have striven hard during the last few years to improve the internal condition of their Empire … They are allies whom we have not the slightest cause to feel ashamed of.’ During the same period, Cardinal Newman published the exactly opposite ideas in a book entitled Lectures on the History of the Turks, writing that ‘Christianity is synonymous with civilization; the Turks are not Christian; therefore the Turks are barbarous’ (both cited in Bowen 1945: 43). What is striking here is not the

NOTES

32

33

34

35

36

201

difference in ideas, but the way in which they produce a state of ambivalence as to the status of Turkey vis-à-vis the West, which provokes both the desire and the frustration of the Turks. Moore-Gilbert has pointed to a ‘persistent inner dissonance’ within Western Orientalism: ‘It is ambivalence rather than a simply dichotomizing and essentializing attitude which more accurately characterizes the Western vision of the East’ (1997: 61). It is not possible to cite all but some of the most significant events of this kind here: the violent assaults against the Jews in the region of Thrace (1934), the mandatory conscription of non-Muslim men into the army (1941), the capital tax that imposed much higher tariffs on non-Muslim citizens (1942), resulting in around 2,000 non-Muslims unable to pay the enormous amount demanded within the time-limit of thirty days being arrested and sent to a forced-labor camp in Aflkale near Bayburt in Eastern Turkey; the violent attacks provoked by the government against non-Muslim shop owners and merchants in Istanbul and the looting of their property (6-7 September 1955); and more recently the assassination of the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, and its dubious connection to the gendarmerie and the police (2007). In all these and other events, the difference of non-Muslims was constituted as an ontological difference guiding the Turkificiation of the population, as the commonly used word ‘infidel’ (gavur) suggests. Most scholars who study the discrimination against non-Muslims in Turkish national history argue that the Turkish state was actively involved in this construction (see Hans-Lukas Kieser 2006). As I will elaborate later, by performative discourse I mean a discourse not defined by any specific content of its statements but its form, which provides a proto-formula for producing and reproducing practices. Similar to Yurchak’s discussion of late Soviet society (2006), I will show that Occidentalism in Turkey is based on a pragmatism that has a very ambiguous and ambivalent content, yet is informed by historical citationality, and hegemonic in the sense that it provides a trope for the production of ‘acceptable’ statements and practices, albeit with diverse meanings. See Butler (2006) for performativity and gender identity. Ünder has claimed that the Kemalists’ philosophy can best be described as pragmatism against the predominant view in that it was positivistic. He argues that pragmatism has been functional in three aspects: it maintains a distance against things that are instrumentalised; it avoids internalisation and thus the deterioration of the real spirit; and it makes it possible to treat the Western world with contempt (1996: 40-1). Ideas against Istanbul were openly stated in the proclamation of Ankara as the capital: ‘Istanbul [, noted the deputy Celal Nuri,] was the capital of the Ottoman Empire, a multinational state formed of peoples of various religions and ethnic identities. Ankara, on the other hand, will have a different meaning as the capital of a national state, a young state still growing up’ (cited in F. Ahmad 1993: 91). To silence the dissident voices that declared Ankara unsuitable as capital, scientific reports were prepared to prove that Ankara was not a barren land, but a plateau. The reports made use of world statistics about temperature, humidity, and other natural factors to compare Ankara’s values. Its climate, though unfavourable in many respects, as it is dry and cold, was regarded as good for

202

37

38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY civilisation. Professor Piery from Lyon University said: ‘The climate here is good for disciplining people for struggling against hardship and pain’ (cited in Atay 1969: 419). The memoirs pertaining to those days reflect a deep frustration with the life in the town when compared to Istanbul, which ‘looked like Paris when viewed from Ankara’ (Atay 1969: 352). The avant-garde (both in military and cultural terms) was ‘alien’ (Karaosmano¤lu 1983) in many ways, like colonisers in a different country. Mostly settled in segregated neighbourhoods, they had difficulties in adapting to the local ways of Ankara; they even found it difficult to understand the language spoken by the local people. They mostly socialised with each other, keeping the dream alive that one day ‘they will mingle with an anonymous crowd’ (Atay 1969: 352). For example, the peasants living in Ankara were forbidden to transgress the invisibly set boundaries in the city (Sertel 1968). Yakup Kadri, another member of the elite at the time, clearly points to the dilemma in his novel entitled Ankara: ‘As I was climbing the stairs to the ball room I felt dizzy. I felt, as if with every step I was moving away from them, as if the gap with the people widens ever more. I had a sudden impulse to jump into this abyss and mix with them, so that I can watch our world, this artificial world from their eyes’ (Karaosmano¤lu 1994: 119, emphasis added). We can also interpret these words of Mustafa Kemal in the light of what Taha Parla has said about the leadership and the nation. According to him, Mustafa Kemal defined the nation as an abstract, even ambiguous substance which lies dormant and which has to be activated by the leader: ‘the substance is not “nowhere,” but will materialize “then-there” under the guidance of the leader’ (1991a: 48-9). See Funda fienol Cantek’s rigorous study of the construction of Ankara as a capital (2003), as well as her edited volume on the demise of the ‘ideal’ Ankara (2006). Eisenstadt has written that the RPP ‘made no notable effort to broaden the party’s popular base and to enlist the support of the peasant masses; instead it concentrated its attention on the small westernized elite’ (1981: 140). As one of the rare preserved old words in Turkish language, ink›lâp means ambiguously both reform and revolution. Burhan Asaf (Belge), ‘Ink›lab›m›z›n Sesi,’ Kadro, no.11, November 1932, p.35. As Foucault has argued, bio-power ‘was one of the central strategies of the selfconstitution of the bourgeoisie’ before it was applied to the working classes in Europe (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 186). Radio and television broadcasting in Turkey was under state control until the beginning of the 1990s. The demands for private broadcasting started to be voiced in the 1980s, with the advent of economic liberalism and privatisation. At that time, besides TRT, the state institution of radio and television, there were only Police Radio, Meteorology Radio and a few other radio stations, which belonged to public economic organisations under government tutelage. At the beginning of the 1990s, many private channels started broadcasting without waiting for the arrival of the new legal regulation, and when they were banned because of their illegal status, there were public protests and demonstrations. Finally, in 1994 a new law was drafted, safeguarding private broadcasting. Yet,

NOTES

47

48 49

50 51 52 53

54 55

203

according to Cankaya (2003), there are still unresolved problems due to the inadequacy of the legal regulation of broadcasting; the lack of general guiding principles, problems of copyright and lack of standardisation (for example, about the duration of commercials) can be listed among many others. The uncontrolled fusion of economic capital and broadcasting, and the resulting monopolisation of channels are also worrying. However, despite the seeming liberalisation, there is still strict government censorship on radio and television programmes in place, enacted by RTUK, the Committee over Radio and Television. The legal decree which permitted the establishment of local radio stations was enacted only in 1959. The Democratic Party government, in line with its populist policies, gave importance to small but powerful radio stations in the provinces. Seven provinces were initially selected for the establishment of radio stations: Erzurum, Kars, Trabzon, Diyarbak›r, Urfa, Van, and Edirne. After the coup d’état in 1960, the decision was first suspended, but nevertheless realised within a year, with a different list of provinces: Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, Adana, Gaziantep and Kars. According to Kocabaflo¤lu, there was an apparent conflict between the official reason for establishing local radio stations and their practical functioning. While officially local radios were regarded as politically important to modernise different parts of the country, in practice these stations were quite poor in terms of their technical base and instruments, and also in administrative and programming facilities. The outcome was a very dependent broadcasting according to Mahmut Tali Öngören (personal interview, 24 January 1996). Many programmes were sent from Ankara. There were also interesting temporal delays in the broadcast programmes; for example, it was not uncommon that a special programme produced specifically for the National Day on 29 October arrived at the radio of a local province a week later. It would indeed be interesting to further think about this temporal delay in the light of the effects of truth. Burhan Belge, ‘Radyo Dünyas›n›n Hususiyetleri,’ Radyo, vol.3, no.27, 15 February 1944, p.1. Liah Greenfeld has argued that ‘what distinguishes nationalism from other types of identity, derives from the fact that nationalism locates the source of individual identity within a “people,” which is seen as the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity’ (1992: 3). Burhan Belge, ‘Radyo ve Halk,’ Radyo, vol.3, no.28, 15 March 1944, p.1. Nurettin Artam, ‘Radyo ve Dil,’ Radyo, vol.3, no.29, 15 April 1944, p.1. As discussed in the following article: ‘Radyo ve Aileler,’ Radyo, vol.3, no.32, 15 July 1944, p.1. ‘During the Depression, an NBC executive neatly summarized the industry’s view of the medium, stating, “Without the advertisement, we would never have conquered radio.” Just a few years later, Adolf Hitler unwittingly added a corollary to that statement, writing in a German radio manual, “Without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany”’ (Strauss 1993: 11). Michele Hilmes has pointed to the clash of a dignified, formal style — even mandating that the unseen announcers wear formal dress — and populism in the history of American broadcasting (1997: 1). Nezih Manyas, ‘Spikerler ve Spikerlik,’ Radyo, vol.2, no.17, 15 April 1943, p.11.

204

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

56 For example, Ziya Gökalp made the following point: ‘We have to accept the civilisation of the West because, if we do not, we shall be enslaved by the powers of the West’ (1981: 259). 57 According to Ziya Gökalp, ‘culture is something which is alive among the people themselves. The elite are those who lack it … The elite are the carriers of civilisation and the people the holders of the culture’ (1981: 259). Chapter 2 1 Although the problem of archives has not yet been an object of extensive scholarly study, it is an acknowledged practical problem among researchers, historians, archivists and media. Once in a while one reads in Turkish newspapers that a public archive was accidentally burned or destroyed due to unfavourable storage conditions. For example, a newspaper clip from 1999, which I still keep in my personal archive, reads that the archives of the National Senate between 1961 and 1980 were destroyed. The directors of the Archives of the National Assembly claim that this was due to a mistake (Radikal, 29 July 1999). A more recent newspaper article commenting on the very new discovery of the destruction of the National Security Council archives also cites numerous instances of the destruction of not only national, but also Ottoman archives (Ayfle Hür, ‘‹mha Edilen Kaç›nc› Arfliv?’ Radikal, 19 December 2004). Informed by stories circulating among historians and other people, the author of this newspaper article mentions several examples of how large amounts of institutional archival material were destroyed, or how most of them ended up in SEKA, the state paper factory, to be recycled. These stories point to an acute and excessive problem; yet, the absence of open problematisation of archives within the institutions themselves makes the question invisible. Furthermore, the existing law specifies neither the authorities, nor the principles for protection. The Directorate of Republican Archives was established only in 1976, 53 years after the foundation of the Republic (see Ah›ska 2006). 2 Gabrielle M. Spiegel has suggested that we distinguish memory from history in this respect. While memory hopes to renew the past, history gives the past the form of a discourse on the dead (2002: 161). Other scholars of memory, such as Koslofsky (2002) and Nora (1989), discuss how memoria or organic memory have been destroyed by the advent of modernity and the establishment of history as a modern discipline, thereby radically altering the relationship between the past and the present. 3 ‘Modernity is not, as such, a project, but merely its form. It is a form of historical consciousness, an abstract temporal structure which, in totalizing history from the standpoint of an ever-vanishing, ever-present present, embraces a conflicting plurality of projects, of possible futures, provided they conform to its basic logical structure’ (Osborne 1995: 23). 4 The TRT was founded in 1964 as a semi-autonomous national broadcasting institution that incorporated the hitherto separate organisations of Ankara and Istanbul Radio. 5 The account of the General Director of Press and Publications Bureau as a reply to my inquiry about the early radio archives, 24 January 1996, Ankara. 6 Personal interview, 25 January 1996, Ankara. 7 However, despite the striking similarities between our research experiences,

NOTES

8 9

10 11 12 13

14

15 16

17

18

205

there are also significant differences. Kocabaflo¤lu has pointed to the rich archival holdings of the texts of radio dramas broadcast in the 1940s (1980: 231), which had already disappeared when I looked for them. This shows the extent of the destruction and ‘loss’ over time. I provide the list of the broadcasters whom I interviewed in the list of sources. For example, the negative remarks of Serpil Erdemgil about early radio drama contradict the information that Kocabaflo¤lu gives about radio drama in the 1940s, which he considers to be the ‘golden years of radio drama’ (1980). The statement of Turgut Özakman that the relations with the BBC did not exist before the 1960s can be refuted by referring to a document dated to 1937 in the BBC Written Archives: ‘M. Hayreddin Bey is the Director General of the newly formed Turkish Government broadcasting service, and he is over here on a longish visit to study the working of the BBC.’ ‘Circulating Memo,’ 1 October 1937, E1/1258. I refer primarily to three programmes: Türkiye Radyolar›nda Yar›m Yüzy›l, Yücel Ertugay, 1975 (four sections); Radyo An›lar›, Elçin Temel (no date); Günün ‹çinden, Sezi Ergun, Zehra Kurttekin, 1987. Radyo An›lar›, Elçin Temel. Ibid. Herzfeld has critically discussed Western bureaucracy from an anthropological perspective, embedding bureaucratic practices in cultural symbols and conventions, thus, refusing the binary distinction between disembodied rationality and embodied forms of culture, which is often evoked to mark the difference between Western and non-Western societies (1991). In the introduction to her edited book on archives, Jale Baysal has written that Turkey has problems, mostly due to the technical inadequacy (that ‘everybody knows to exist’), in managing the vast archives of the Ottoman Empire (1984), without attending to possible reasons. Archimedia, no.1, 1993. Turkey decided to open the Ottoman Archives in the late 1980s to academic research related to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. This was to be a proof of Turkey’s immunity from the so-called Armenian Genocide; however, this did not help to end either the academic or the political debate on the status of archives or the so-called Armenian Genocide. The fierce debate is still continuing in academic circles, as well as in national and international political arenas. The conference organised by Bo¤aziçi University, Bilgi University, and Sabanc› University in September of 2005, entitled ‘Ottoman Armenians during the Decline of the Empire,’ was one of the first attempts to historicise the question in Turkey. Many of the papers in the conference were based on archival research; however, the assumed transparency of the archives was also questioned through a critical-historical perspective. Scannell and Cardiff have also pointed to the vast amount of records in the BBC Written Archives: ‘At present the Written Archives, in the grounds of the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park, Reading, contain at least 200,000 files on all aspects of broadcasting from the early twenties through the early sixties’ (1991: xiii). I agree with Donald and Rattansi that multiculturalism is a problematic concept that fails to address the continuing hierarchies of power. Multiculturalism

206

19 20 21

22

23

24

25

26

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY remains ‘within the political logic of assimilationism. Historically it plays a role to endorse the claims to tolerance and inclusiveness of English national culture and the British state’ (Donald and Rattansi 1992: 2). According to Bhabha, ‘[t]he non-West, as its name implies, represents the nonplace, terra incognita, the wasteland, “whose history has to be begun, whose archives must be filled out”’ (cited in T. Mitchell, 2000: 16). See Ah›ska (2006) for further elaboration on the question of archives, history and memory. What Foucault calls the positivity of discourse (and the conditions of operation of the enunciative function) ‘defines a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translation of concepts, and polemical interchanges may be deployed. Thus positivity plays the role of what might be called a historical a priori’ (2002: 143). Foucault argues that ‘it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say — and to itself, the object of our discourse — its modes of appearance, its forms of existence, its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance’ (2002: 146-7). I employ the term ‘intimacy’ similar to the way in which Herzfeld offers ‘cultural intimacy as an antidote to the formalism of cultural nationalism’ (1997: 14). Herzfeld has argued that an adherence to a static cultural ideal, such as Western modernity in non-Western contexts, ‘provides some actors with a mask with which to conceal a variety of messages’ (21). The performance of modernity can be thought in connection to what Timothy Mitchell calls the ‘staging’ of Western modernity, which creates the effect of an ‘original, of what appears to be the actual nation, the people itself, the real economy’ (2000: 19). However, my conception of the performance of modernity in a non-Western context is not mere ‘staging.’ As Alexei Yurchak has argued in the case of the Soviet Union, ‘the performative reproduction of the form of rituals and speech acts actually enabled the emergence of diverse, multiple, and unpredictable meanings in everyday life, including those that did not correspond to the constative meanings of authoritative discourse’ (2006: 25). Yet, one should remember, in the light of Saba Mahmood’s warning, that these performative acts, which become intelligible within a particular culture over time do not usually produce ‘progressive change,’ but result in ‘continuity, statis, and stability’ (2001: 212). Bernard Lewis’s sympathetic and supportive attitude has had its repercussions in Turkey. Suat Y›ld›r›m, an Islamic scholar who has written on the errors of Orientalism, nevertheless emphasises the merits of Orientalists and praises Lewis for his positive impact: ‘He speaks good Turkish, almost every year he comes to Turkey, his interviews are broadcast on TV. His three-day interview 15 years ago on state television, then the only television channel, had a big impact’ (2002: 30). Chatterjee has made a similar point when discussing how all, ‘even industrially advanced liberal democracies,’ heralded the need for a community. However, he says, ‘not all communities were worthy of approval in modern political life. In particular, attachments that seemed to emphasize the inherited, the primordial, the parochial, or the traditional were regarded by most theorists as smacking of

NOTES

27

28

29 30

31

32

33

207

conservative and intolerant practices and hence as inimical to the values of modern citizenship. The political community that seemed to find the largest measure of approval was the modern nation that grants equality and freedom to all citizens irrespective of biological or cultural difference’ (2004: 32). Of course, he would argue that equality and freedom pull in opposite directions in modern nation-states, which cannot structurally fulfil the promise of universality. Both Chatterjee (2004) and Chakrabarty (2000) in discussing post-colonial India have argued that the encounter with modernity in the (post)colonial context produced heterogeneous temporalities. I endorse this point, albeit with a reservation. Post-colonial criticism most often tends to homogenise Western modernity without attending to its temporal heterogeneity. Jason Read has presented an elaborate argument about the subjectivity of the working classes regarding the heterogeneous time of (Western) capitalism from a Marxist perspective (2003). ‘In Ottoman texts up to the middle of the 19th century, and in many of them much later, the word “Turkey” is not used. It was a Western term, used by Westerners to describe a country which the Turks themselves usually called “the lands of Islam,” “the imperial realm,” “the divinely guarded realm,” “the Ottoman dominions,” and similar expressions — and these were of course understood to include the whole of the Empire and not simply the area inhabited by the Turkish nation, the very existence of which was concealed. The word “Turk” was indeed used, but in much the same way as “fellah” is used in modern Arabic — to denote the ignorant peasant — and its application to the Ottoman gentleman of Istanbul would have been an insult. It is in the course of the 19th century and under Western influence, that these two ideas appear and make headway: the idea of a Turkey as a country inhabited by a certain people and constituting a natural entity, and the idea of the Turks as a nation, distinct from the Ottoman dynasty and Empire. One of the most important sources of these ideas was the new European science of Turcology’ (B. Lewis 2004: 423). Zizek points to the inventedness of ‘national tradition’ as a screen that ‘conceals not the process of modernisation but the true ethnic tradition itself in its unbearable factuality’ (2000: 214). Buruma and Margalit have referred to the concept of ‘overcoming modernity’ as a threatening phenomenon, which manifests itself in the form of ‘hating the West’ in the non-Western parts of today’s world; and they warn against its grave political consequences (2004). ‘That is, modernism sought to flee history at the same time that it appealed to older historical representations of the authentic cultural object as a way to replace abstractions and fragmentation with concreteness and wholeness’ (Harootunian 2000: xxi). I think Ballibar and Wallerstein’s illuminating work on race, nation and class provides important arguments for discussing how the nation, and particularly the nation-state was belated with regard to the development of capitalism, and how these functioned to sustain a hegemony in order to mask the conflicts and overcome the crises within the development of capitalism (1991), or similarly of modernity, with its potential to dissolve all that is solid, as Marx and Engels would say. Even in Occidentalism as anti-Westernism, for example, in Hanafi’s texts, or

208

34 35

36

37

38

39

40 41

42

43

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY much earlier in Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi (Westoxication, 1962), nativism is paradoxically sought in the light of Western civilisation, by appropriating Western philosophy and sciences (Boroujerdi 1996). Dünden Bügüne Radyo-Televizyon, 1927-90, TRT Publications. The critics of Occidentalism, in Turkey and elsewhere, focus more on the disabling aspects, such as the splits in the consciousness of the Eastern subject, rather than attending to Occidentalism’s enabling capacity as a discourse of power. For example, Alim Arl› (2004) regards Occidentalism as a product of ‘cultural schizophrenia,’ which is both resistant and defensive. Foucault warns us against not assessing things ‘in terms of an absolute against which they could be evaluated as constituting more or less perfect forms of rationality, but rather examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them, because it’s true that “practices” don’t exist without a certain regime of rationality’ (1991b: 79). One of his most important questions is: ‘How can scientific discourses be objects of a political practice?’ (1991a: 69). His method of inquiry employs tools that are mostly borrowed from the tradition of Western sciences, such as diagrams, schemes, and grids used to demonstrate the operations of discursive practices. In fact, Foucault’s articulation of genealogy as a way of understanding history is different from what he posited as history in The Archeology of Knowledge. Genealogy suggests ‘effective history’ that reads against the totalisation of knowledge and monumentalisation of history by cutting the contingent out of the continuum. However, it would not be wrong to say that Foucault’s genealogical inquiry is still bound by the Western universe. For example, Ann Laura Stoler is critical of Foucault’s study of sexuality for overlooking Western colonialism (1995). Foucault in his much cited article ‘The Subject and Power’ has argued that his method ‘rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality … consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies’ (1982: 211). Foucault often used texts and documents as his sources; his ‘battlefield was at the same time the world of archives and manuscripts’ (Kritzman 1988: xviii). Derrida’s critique of Foucault centres on his assumptions about history: ‘A history, that is, an archaeology against reason doubtless cannot be written, for, despite all appearances to the contrary, the concept of history has always been a rational one. It is the meaning of “history” or archia that should have been questioned first, perhaps. A writing that exceeds, by questioning them, the values “origin,” “reason” and “history” could not be contained within the metaphysical closure of archaeology’ (Derrida 1978: 36). The critique bears on my previous point regarding the historical a priori in the discussion of the missing archives. ‘Even if the Aufklärung has been a very important phase in our history and in the development of political technology, I think we have to refer to much more remote processes if we want to understand how we have been trapped in our history’ (Foucault 1982: 210). Foucault’s interpretation, for example, of the revolutionary struggle of the people in Iran appears as an exception to his method of analysis. Young has criticised Foucault for his fantasy of ‘a collective will, as pure being, screens the

NOTES

44

45 46 47

48

49

50

209

historical relation of the revolution to its colonial adversaries’ (1995: 57). Because it happens elsewhere, in a non-Christian, non-Western environment, the revolution in Iran seems to transcend ‘what might appear as the “prison house of discourse”’ (Kritzman 1988: xxii). It is a central theme in Bhabha’s argument that ‘the role the non-Western world played in the constitution of modernity has never been properly acknowledged’ (Moore-Gilbert 1997: 123). ‘Bhabha is particularly concerned by the refusal in certain recent accounts of modernity to address these issues. This is exemplified by Foucault’s failure to register how Social Darwinism not only prepared the way for Nazism but was itself first developed in the context of contacts with non-Western cultures made available through colonial history’ (Ibid.) See Achilles Mbembe for a discussion of ‘necropolitics,’ regarding how destruction and death become instruments of power in Africa (2003). See Bhabha (1993) and Nandy (1994) for the most prominent examples for the employment of psychoanalytical categories in post-colonial contexts. Fanon wrote: ‘I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no accord was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward irrationality ... I wade in the irrational. Up to the neck in the irrational. And how my voice vibrates!’ (1993: 123). Nevertheless, the analyses of these interconnections remain problematic and have been subject to criticism. The employment of both Freud’s and Lacan’s theories in the analysis of the colonial situation have been problematised in terms of their shortcomings regarding the acknowledgement of not only colonial history but also gender, race and class. Spivak has extensively dealt with these problems and suggested that both Freud’s and Lacan’s work needs to be situated within the history of ‘the institutionalization of psychoanalysis ... and its imposition upon the colonies’ (1987: 261-2). The Ottoman Empire disrupted the binary oppositions of East and West, of coloniser/colonised. The Ottoman Empire was an imperial force colonising peripheral territories ranging from the Balkans to the Arab lands, yet it underwent Western cultural and economic colonisation starting in the eighteenth century. It then becomes worthwhile to ponder Edward Said’s neglect of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in his study of Orientalism. Said primarily sites the ‘Oriental’ Other in the Arabic world where he partially belongs, and his indifference to the Turkish case implies that Turkey stands in a very problematic relationship to the Arab world, the Ottoman Empire being the former colonial power in Palestine. This may reflect Said’s own ambivalence about the history of Ottoman hegemony over Palestine. Said has also been ambivalent about Turkey’s status in relation to the West. He has written about Auerbach’s exile in Istanbul: ‘Throughout the classical period of European culture Turkey was the Orient, Islam its most redoubtable and aggressive representative. This was not all, though. The Orient and Islam also stood for the ultimate alienation from and opposition to Europe. For centuries Turkey and Islam hung over Europe like a gigantic composite monster, seeming to threaten Europe with destruction. To have been an exile in Istanbul at that time of fascism in Europe was a deeply resonating and intense form of exile from Europe’ (1983: 6, emphasis added). For Melanie Klein, it has a deeper meaning. In Klein’s concept, phantasy emanates from within and imagines what is without; it offers an unconscious

210

51 52 53 54

55 56 57

58

59 60

61

62 63

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY commentary on instinctual life, links feelings to objects and creates a new amalgam: the world of imagination. Through its ability to phantasize, the baby tests out, primitively ‘thinks’ about its experiences of inside and outside (J. Mitchell 1987). Dr. ‹zeddin fiadan, ‘Türkiye’de Mafleri Nevroz,’ Yeni Adam, no.198, 199, 200. 14, 21, 28 October 1937. Dr. ‹zeddin fiadan, ‘Türkiye’de Mafleri Nevroz,’ Yeni Adam, no.198, 14 October 1937, p.8. Dr.‹zeddin fiadan, ‘Türkiye’de Mafleri Nevroz,’ Yeni Adam, no.199, 21 October 1937, p.8. ‘The status of the subject itself (the subject of the signifier) is that of just such a “virtual image”: its exists only as a virtual point in the self-relating of the signifier’s dyads; as something that “will have been,” that is never present in reality or its “real” (actual) image. It is always-already “past,” although it never appeared “in the past itself”; it is constituted by means of a double reflection, as the result of the way the past’s mirroring in the future is mirrored back to the present’ (Zizek 1996: 15). Yeni Adam, no.199, 21 October 1937, p.8. See Ah›ska (2003) for a critical discussion of Occidentalism and Turkey’s relationship with the European Union. However, Europe at that time also had other connotations as an embodied force that could put an end to existing miseries. For example, in Yakup Kadri’s novel based on the war years, there is a reference to several peasants’ belief that ‘Europe’ was a queen who had sent her armies to save the peasants, and who was going to convert to Islam after the victory (Karaosmano¤lu 1983: 141). Anatolia was a land of heterogeneity then. Not only were there non-Muslim populations, but also many Muslim people did not consider themselves ‘Turks.’ Apart from scholarly studies on the populations of Anatolia, it is striking that as a member of the nationalist elite Yakup Kadri cites the marginality of the ‘Turk’ in one of his novels. The protagonist in the novel is an intellectual man — a nationalist who tries to persuade the peasants of the prospect of unifying Turks. He says that all Turks should support Mustafa Kemal. One comment coming from a peasant is indeed interesting; the peasant reacts by saying that they are Muslims but not Turks and adds that ‘Turks live in Haymana’ (a particular district in Central Anatolia) (Karaosmano¤lu 1983: 173). See Pekin (2005); O. Y›ld›r›m (2006). Mardin uses the term to point to the criticism of those writers in the late nineteenth century, such as Ahmet Mithat and Hüseyin Rahmi, who were sarcastic about the life-style of Westernised figures in Ottoman society. Their writing mainly focused on the tragic effects of Westernisation on women and feminised ‘weak’ men (Mardin 1991: 23-81). See Ussama Makdisi for a discussion of Ottoman Orientalism regarding the Arabs as an integral aspect of the process of nationalist modernisation in Ottoman society in the nineteenth century (2002: 768). See Welat Zeydanl›o¤lu for a critical perspective on Kemalism, Orientalism and the Kurds (2008). See A. Davison (1995) for the debates on Gökalp’s relation to Islam and secularism. Gökalp criticised the Tanzimat reformers back in the mid-nineteenth century

NOTES

64 65

66

67 68

69

70

211

for not being able to recognise European civilisation as a whole: ‘They wanted to take the European civilisation. But they took it only partially, not as a whole. Therefore they could neither establish a real university nor a harmonized juridical structure … This was because they tried to do things without a comprehensive scientific analysis, an effective ideal and a precise program; they were partial in all their affairs’ (1994: 57). ‘The old Ottoman elite scorned the peasant as “stupid Turk”; the people of Anatolia were ridiculed as “outsiders”; the title given to people was “vulgar”’ (Gökalp 1981: 260). Gökalp defined the concept of the ideal as a force: ‘Psychological facts, which we call opinion, ideal, belief are not mere passive ideas and ineffective representations. In them, creative and destructive forces, positive or negative values are inherent’ (1981: 52). Although Gökalp’s ideas have usually been associated with Durkheim’s sociology, his account of civilisation comes close to that of Gabriel Tarde, Durkheim’s contemporary and opponent. Whereas for Durkheim there was (or should be) an ‘organic’ equation of the shared culture and the social, according to Tarde, the social is characterised by the lines of a flow of imitation and invention, and by the formation of the public in place of crowds. He wrote that ‘[c]ivilization has, fortunately, the effect of constantly increasing the actions at a distance over other people, through the ceaseless extension of the territorial field and of the numbers of those addressed, as a result of the diffusion of the book and the newspaper, and this is not the smallest service that it performs … as a compensation for so many evils’ (cited in Laclau 2005: 43). I would like to thank Andrew Barry for pointing out this reference. Ülken’s monograph on Ziya Gökalp bears no date of publication. Dumont argues that ‘there is unbroken continuity in Turkish modernist doctrine from the ideology of the Tanzimat to the six Kemalist arrows’ (1984: 41). Eisenstadt proposes a comparative framework of revolutions along the axis of continuity/discontinuity. He locates the Turkish Revolution in between the English case, where there was a relatively small degree of discontinuity, and the Russian case, where the largest discontinuity was experienced (1981: 140). The so-called ‘language revolution’ in the new Republic — that is, the adoption of the Latin script in place of the Ottoman one and the crafting of new Turkish words — is an excellent example of the feeling of urgency. When the commission working on the new alphabet came up with two alternative time schedules — a fifteen- or a five-year transition programme — Mustafa Kemal replied that ‘this will either happen in three months or it won’t happen at all’ (cited in G. L. Lewis 1984: 199). According to Mardin, Mustafa Kemal, the leader of the national project, was thinking in decades, whereas Ottoman intellectuals had been thinking in millennia (Mardin 1981: 200). It is generally accepted that Kemalists did not attempt a total revolutionary change. Özbudun has argued that attempted changes remained primarily within the field of ‘superstructure’ (1981: 93). Feroz Ahmad (1993) gives a comprehensive account of the economic, political and social reasons for the Kemalists’ divide between reforming and totally changing society. He has also pointed to how the ambiguous term ink›lâp was disputed in the Kemalist party, while the moderates interpreted it as reformism and the radicals emphasised revolution-

212

71

72 73

74

75

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY ism (63). I would argue that Partha Chatterjee’s use of the Gramscian concept of passive revolution in the Indian context can be perfectly explanatory for Turkey, too. Passive revolution had the strategy of a ‘molecular transformation’ of the state, ‘neutralizing opponents, converting sections of the former ruling classes into allies in a partially reorganized system of government, undertaking economic reforms on a limited scale so as to appropriate the support of the popular masses but keeping them out of any form of direct participation in the processes of governance’ (Chatterjee 1993a: 45). The journal Yeni Adam introduced the question in 1937, asking whether Mehmet Akif was a nationalist or an Islamic poet. Yeni Adam, no.67, 11 March 1937. In the 1960s, the question still persisted. Samet A¤ao¤lu said that an MP, Hamdullah Suphi Tanr›över, an enthusiastic admirer of Western civilisation, who suggested Mehmet Akif’s poem to be set to music as the national anthem is such an enigma; ‘it is as difficult to interpret such an act today, as it was then.’ Türk Yurdu, February 1967, p.125. The anthem reads: ‘Fear not, how can that monster called Civilization/Choke with the last tooth in its jaw, the faith of an entire nation.’ Kemalists actually used anti-democratic means to suppress any opposition. The law for the Maintenance of Order in 1925, in the aftermath of Kurdish rebellions in Eastern Anatolia, brought harsh measures and heavy censorship on the press and freedom of opinion. This was a particularly important blow for leftist journals (Tuncay 1981: 142-6). The opponents of the regime were also effectively silenced by special juridical courts at that time, known as Independence Tribunals (Tuncay, 1981: 140-1). The opposition party, the Progressive Republican Party founded in 1924, was banned. However, in addition to the harsh measures Kemalists also sought ways to accommodate the opposition. The initiative of founding a token opposition party, the Free Party, is one interesting example. The party was established on Mustafa Kemal’s orders in 1930, in order to ‘improve Turkey’s image in Western Europe’ (F. Ahmad 1993: 59). However, the party attracted an unexpectedly high interest from the people, and there were strikes and demonstrations around the name of the party, followed by a bloody event. The uprising of the members of an Islamic mystical sect in central Anatolia led by Dervish Mehmed caused the execution by beheading of an officer in the local gendarmerie. The demand articulated in the uprising was to restore the Islamic regime. The Free Party was banned in the same year. There was a strong sentiment at the Economic Congress of Turkey in 1923 concerning the establishment of ‘national economic sovereignty.’ The idea was to build a national industrial economy by abolishing the privileges that Europeans enjoyed due to the capitulations of the Ottoman Empire, which was regarded by Kemalists as a ‘colony of foreigners.’ However, the forced immigration of the non-Muslim populations, who used to hold most of the trade and industrial enterprises, with the population exchange of 1924, in addition to the poor condition of the economy after the war rendered the ideal highly impossible. Therefore, Kemalists under the rubric of ‘sovereignty’ invited foreign capital; between 1920 and 1930 about a third of the companies established were jointventures with foreign capital (F. Ahmad 1993: 72-101). For an account of the foreign policies during World War II and a comprehensive bibliography on Turkish foreign policy before and during the period, see

NOTES

213

Deringil (2004). 76 Turkey established friendly relations with the Bolsheviks starting from the beginning of the 1920s. For an account of the history of Soviet-Turkish relations during the National Struggle, see Gökay (1996). 77 All these principles had also pragmatic functions. Republicanism, which defined the regime, was coined against the old regime symbolised by the sultanate. Nationalism was the product of the past nationalist movements, but it also delineated the Turkish regime from Islamic internationalism. Populism was the legitimating of the power of the national elite to be representatives of the people. Statism signified the anti-liberal economic and political policies, which treated the nation not as composed of different classes but as a unified whole. The state adopted a paternalistic role in regulating society and economy. Laicism, which justified the abolition of the caliphate, aimed to centralise the regulation of Islam and dismiss its use as a political tool by the other segments of society. Finally, Reformism/Revolutionism secured the rule of Kemalists by making it certain that the reforms/revolutions were unchangeable (Karal 1981). All of these principles were contested by different groups, among which Islamists, liberals and rural landlords can be cited (F. Ahmad 1993). 78 In 1922, the sultanate and in 1924 the caliphate were abolished. In the same year, a new constitution was accepted; the laws of March 1924 put education under the monopoly of the state and banned the medreses, the religious schools. In 1926, a civil code based on Swiss law was adopted in place of the Islamic code of law, and in the same year the Gregorian calendar was put into effect, while the Islamic way of time-keeping was replaced with the international clock. In 1927, radio broadcasting was inaugurated. After replacing Arabic numerals with Western ones, a new Turkish-Latin script was introduced in 1928. Women were granted voting rights in 1930, and the right to stand for election in national elections in 1934. In 1935, Sunday was declared the weekly holiday, in line with Western Christian tradition. 79 ‘They are uniquely important people to know in this era of one-world hopes, because they live in a country which is both Asia and Europe, and share the culture and problems of both Occident and Orient’ (Bisbee 1951: ix). 80 People’s Houses, as semi-educational and politically charged institutions following the Turkish Hearths in the Ottoman Empire, were established to maintain closer contact with the people in order to educate and discipline them. The set goal was to ‘perpetually constitute the bases of national and social life through discipline, education and speech’ (Prime Minister, ‹smet ‹nönü, cited in Halkevleri 1932-1935: 103 Halkevi Geçen Y›llarda Nas›l Çal›flt›, p.2). They were initially designed as sites of cultural exchange and solidarity, where ideally people would bring their own experiences and learn from each other. However, in practice, the People’s Houses had a highly centralised structure and were eventually associated with the government (Kirby 1963; Öztürkmen 1998; Türko¤lu 1996). Tan›l Bora draws attention to the mismatch of the design and the practice of the People’s Houses (1996). Their motto of ‘going to the people’ constitutes a highly significant subject to analyse the dynamics of populism in Turkey. Their operations manifest how the representation of the people had to be denied in practical terms, both to secure an ideal image and to sustain a central authority. Mesut Ye¤en has analysed the People’s Houses from

214

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY a Foucauldian perspective, as instruments of discipline (1995). However, they could alternatively be studied as sites where different truths of the government were manifested.

Chapter 3 1 Lesley Johnson’s account of early Australian radio bears some resemblance to the Turkish case in the sense that radio, in its early years, was received as a sign of universal modernity in Australia (1988). Not only radio broadcasting in the service of existing powers, but also those which were oppositional in nature — broadcasting for the national struggle, guerilla warfare, or the workers’ movements — have acquired similar meanings attached to universality and progress (Fanon 1970; Godfried 1997; Ignacio and Vigil 1995). 2 It was towards the end of World War I that radio, which had been a field for amateurs before, became a more systematic tool employed by governments and institutions. In 1922 the Soviet Union, Britain and Switzerland; in 1923 Norway, Austria, Italy and Finland; in 1925 Denmark and Sweden; in 1926 Yugoslavia and Ireland; and in 1928 Greece started regular radio broadcasting (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 16). 3 Radyo, vol.3, no.28, 15 March 1944, p.1. 4 As I have indicated in the introduction, one of the most detailed studies about Turkish Radio is Kocabaflo¤lu’s manuscript, fiirket Telsizinden Devlet Radyosuna, written in 1980, which includes information about the institutional and legal framework of Turkish radio broadcasting until 1964, its connections to the state and other institutions, its technological infrastructure, the programme schedules and synopsis of their content, estimates about the number of listeners, and information on several broadcasters. 5 Nedim Veysel ‹lkin, ‘Radyonun Bize Kazand›rd›¤› K›ymetler,’ Radyo, vol.4, no.39, p.1 6 The enterprise was initiated by Celal Bayar (‹fl Bank), Mahmut Soydan (Siirt MP and representative of Anatolian Agency), Cemal Hüsnü Taray (Gümüflhane MP) and Seda Nuri ‹leri (a merchant). 7 Advertisement searching for presenters to be hired by Istanbul Radio, Vakit, 3 February 1927. 8 ‘Türkiye’de ‹lk Radyo Yay›nlar› ‹stasyonunun Aç›l›fl›,’ American Embassy, Istanbul, 27 May 1927. 9 This created some concern, for example, for the British. Public Record Office, 8 July 1925, Correspondence from R. H. Howe to A. Chamberlain, FO371/10865. 10 Mete Tuncay has written about corruption during the RPP regime. According to Tuncay, several privileged persons during this period helped foreign companies to make economic deals with the Turkish government and received bribes from the companies in return (1981: 206-8). 11 Dün’den Bugüne Radyo-Televizyon, 1927-1990, TRT Yay›nlar›, 1990, p.10. 12 Interview, ‘Günün ‹çinden,’ Sezi Ergun, Zehra Kurtekin, 1987. 13 A public address to men that Atatürk most often used in his speeches in the National Assembly. 14 The journal Telsiz complained about this, saying that ‘our newspapers are not very much interested in the wireless.’ Necip Celal, ‘Biz de bir Radyo Kulübü

NOTES

215

Tesis Etmeliyiz,’ Telsiz, vol.16, 27 October 1927, p.2. 15 Ideas against Istanbul had been overtly stated in the proclamation of Ankara as the capital: ‘Istanbul [, noted the deputy Celal Nuri,] was the capital of the Ottoman Empire, a multinational state formed of peoples of various religions and ethnic identities. Ankara, on the other hand, will have a different meaning as the capital of a national state, a young state still growing up’ (cited in F. Ahmad, 1993: 91). Feroz Ahmad has made the point that Istanbul was also associated with ‘conservatives,’ and adds, ‘such was the bitterness between Ankara and Istanbul … that Kemal refused to visit Istanbul after its liberation and went there only in 1928’ (1993: 54). 16 Radio’s service to ‘the conditions and exigencies of the financial world’ is a trait common to many countries at the beginning of the century (Marvin 1988). James Carey saw this as central to the formation of national markets (1992). 17 Between 1927 and 1936, music broadcasting amounted to approximately 84 percent of the transmissions of Ankara and Istanbul Radio (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 72). 18 The approximate proportions were: ‘Turkish music’ amounted to a total of 30.3 per cent and ‘Western music’ to a total of 40.28 per cent). 19 A special musical instrument that has been used in Anatolia for centuries. 20 Ahmet Hamdi Tanp›nar has referred to the diminishing life in the cafés of Istanbul in the late 1920s due to the musicians now playing for radio (Tanp›nar 1979). 21 Hours of daily transmission were unstable and varied over time. Ankara Radio sometimes had to stop its transmissions. The average time of daily transmission for Istanbul was four to five hours, whereas for Ankara it was three hours. 22 Telsiz, no.1, 30 June 1927. 23 The word used in Turkish is ahenk, which means harmony, but also drinking bout, and has connotations of entertainment life. 24 Ismay›l Hakk› (Baltac›o¤lu), ‘Radyoyu Ülkülefltirmek Laz›md›r,’ Yeni Adam, no.8, 19 February 1934, p.7. 25 ‘Radyo E¤lence midir?’ Yeni Adam, no.92, 3 October 1935, p.10. 26 ‘Türk Radyosu Ne Yap›yor?’ Müzik ve Sanat Hareketleri, no.1, September 1934, p.9. 27 ‘Radyoyu Köylere Sokal›m,’ Müzik ve Sanat Hareketleri, no.2, October 1934. 28 Hamit Zübeyr particularly mentioned radio as one of the instruments of educating the people. ‘Halk Terbiyesi Vas›talar›,’ Ülkü, vol.1, no.2, March 1933. 29 Cevat Fehmi, ‘Radyo Stüdyosunda Bir Saat,’ Cumhuriyet, 22 October 1932. 30 ‘Radyo An›lar›,’ Elçin Temel. 31 Ibid. 32 ‘By 1930, it was generally agreed by the Republican elites that the reforms that were undertaken in the course of the 1920s had not taken root. This problem was to be remedied with further reforms from above that were geared towards creating a new Turk’ (Kad›o¤lu 1996: 188). 33 Yeni Adam, no.10, 5 May 1934, p.10. 34 A declaration on culture in Yeni Adam demanded that all cultural means be under the control of state authority. The listed demands were: ‘1. We want the city theatre to be a stage for culture; 2.We want cinema to become an organ of revolution; 3. We want radio to be a public university and a music academy; 4.

216

35 36

37

38

39

40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY We want newspapers purified from their pornographic content and become a social and a political school; 5. We want journals to be freed from the dictates of the market; 6.We want the book publishing to be designed according to the ideals of knowledge and culture.’ Yeni Adam, no.81, 18 July 1935. Cited in And (1983: 3). ‘The brief history of radio introduced it as a medium of entertainment to us. We are used to hear dance tunes at certain hours in the evening. But it is not that difficult to see that radio cannot be confined to the dissemination of only musical sounds. It can also broadcast lectures, monologues, interviews, dramas, lessons, radio journals.’ Yeni Adam, no.92, 3 October 1935, p.10. A term derived from the Italian word alla turca designating Middle Eastern or ‘Oriental’ style as opposed to alla franca (Western). See Tekelio¤lu (1996) and Stokes (1992) for a discussion of the derogatory connotations of alaturka in Turkey. Even Sultan Abdülhamit II, at the beginning of the century, had said: ‘To tell the truth, I am not especially fond of alaturka music. It makes you sleepy. I prefer alafranga music, in particular the operas and operettas. And shall I tell you something? The modes we call alaturka aren’t really Turkish. They are taken from Greeks, Persians, Arabs’ (Aksoy 1985: 1223). Gökalp argued that ‘we, just like the Westerners, have borrowed alaturka music from the Byzantine music in the Middle Ages. However, the Westerners managed to overcome the ‘errors’ and gave rise to ‘civilised’ music. But the Eastern music — which was ‘depressingly monotonous’ — played in the Ottoman lands, continued its ‘ill’ state. Today there are three kinds of music: Eastern music, Western music, and Folk music. Our national music will be a product of the combination of our Folk music with Western music’ (1994: 126-8). Peyami Safa, ‘Alkolik Musiki,’ Yeni Adam, no.8, 19 February 1934, p.9. ‘A congress convened in 1934 with musicians such as Cemal Reflit Rey, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Ferit Alnar, Necil Kaz›m Akses, Halil Bedii Yönetken, opened with the question of the Minister of Education: ‘So we are supposed to do a music reform, how shall we do it?’ To ban mono-vocal music was the first decision of the music reform. It led to interesting events when the decision was applied in the country with the help of the security forces. The most prominent example would be the gendarmerie collecting saz [long-necked lutes] in the villages and prohibiting its use as a musical instrument’ (Hasgül 1996: 38). Ay›n Tarihi, vol.22, no.23, April 1930, p.6054-5. Zab›t Ceridesi, vol.25, Period 4, Meeting 4, no.4. Mustafa Kemal was generally addressed by his inferiors as Gazi, which means a warrior who has fought in a religious war. A supplement to Müzik ve Sanat Hareketleri, January 1935. This resembles the case of Greek Occidentalism, particularly in Crete, where everything local was despised as foreign (Turkish) and where paradoxically the West became the Greek tradition (Herzfeld 1995: 248). The boundary distinction between ‘Turkish Classical Music’ and ‘Turkish Folk Music’ was still unclear at that time and only institutionalised after the nationalisation of radio. Cevdet Kozano¤lu, Radyo Hat›ral›r›m, p.11. The undesired Arabic influence on Turkish culture was a theme that continued

NOTES

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

70

71

217

for years. See Özbek (1991) and Stokes (1992) for the arabesk debate in Turkey. Peyami Safa, ‘M›s›r Radyosu,’ Cumhuriyet, 6 August 1936. Yakup Kadri, ‘Samimiyete Davet,’ Kadro, no.16, April 1933. A special makam, a set musical mode in alaturka. The journalist whom Mustafa Kemal had given the interview on Turkish music, and who is also famous for his interviews with Mussolini and Stalin. Burhan Asaf (Belge), ‘Ink›lab›m›z›n Sesi,’ Kadro, no.11, November 1932. The new legal decrees concerning the police, settlement, press and universities in these years contributed to the aggravation of central state power, together with the discourse of ‘hardening the nation.’ Zab›t Ceridesi, Period 5, Meeting 1, Session 1, vol.6, p.3. CHP Dördüncü Büyük Kurultay› Görüflmeleri Tutulgas›, Ankara: Ulus Bas›mevi, 1935, p.73. Cemal Yorulmaz, Bizde ve Öteki Memleketlerde Radyo, 1945, unpublished manuscript. While in the western parts of the country, there was one radio receiver per 112 people, it was one to 4,727 in the Eastern Anatolia, and one to 3,107 in Southeastern Anatolia (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 146). ‹smay›l Hakk› Baltac›o¤lu, ‘Demiryolu ve Türk Bütünlü¤ü,’ Yeni Adam, 5 March 1934, p.10. For example, in 1915 the journal Türk Yurdu talked about Istanbul as the head and Anatolia as the ignored body (Toprak 1995: 45). Radyo, vol.1, no.4, 15 March 1942, p.9. Burhan Belge, ‘Radyo ve Gazete,’ Radyo, vol.1, no.4, 15 March 1942, p.1. Nurettin Artam, ‘Radyo ve Dil,’ Radyo, vol.3, no.29, 15 April 1944, p.1. Burhan Belge, ‘Radyo Dünyas›n›n Hususiyetleri,’ Radyo, vol.3, no.27, 15 February 1944, p.1. For example, there was a complaint that it was not possible to make the people like the ‘new’ music given the limitations of the local cadres working in the People’s Houses. Halkevleri 1923-1935: 103 Halkevi Geçen Y›llarda Nas›l Çal›flt›, p.41. In the same years, the Hungarian musician Bela Bartok was invited to conduct research and compile folk music in Turkey. He prepared a report entitled ‘Suggestions for a Folk Music Archive’ (Filiz Ali 1983: 1531-4). fierif Sait Ceren, ‘Muzaffer Sar›sözen’le bir Konuflma,’ Radyo, vol.3, no.31, 15 June 1944, p.9. Radife Erten, a folk singer, tells in her memoirs about the long hours of practice and education in Ankara Radio: ‘It was like a school. We were put in a studio for three or four hours to practice. Then our teacher Nuri Halil Bey would come to check on us, also other teachers would come and check who is working and who is not. They would pull the ear of those who are not working.’ ‘Türkiye Radyolar›nda Yar›m Yüzy›l,’ Yücel Ertugay. For example, the traditional music of tarikats (religious orders) was dealt a major blow and to a great extent vanished, except for the mystical music of Mevlevi origin, when all tekkes and zaviyes (religious lodges and monasteries) were abolished after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic (Tekelio¤lu 1996: 198). The elite in Ankara had very little knowledge of the existing cultures in Anatolia, especially in the Eastern and Southern areas of Turkey. Handan Uran,

218

72

73 74

75 76 77

78 79 80 81

82

83

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY who took part in radio dramas in the 1940s, said that it was common in Ankara at that time that people only thought of Anatolia as an image. She has told me in an interview how she was really shocked when they first went on a train journey to Mersin. Personal interview, 16 November 1996. ‘The only kind of human being, who does not understand serious issues, and then unceremoniously sets aside the seriousness to make a caricature of these issues that he has been unable to understand, can only be found in a single city of Turkey: Istanbul.’ fievket Süreyya, ‘Yar› Münevverler Kulübü,’ Kadro, no.8, August 1932, p.42. Many musicians from Istanbul Radio came to Ankara during these years to work in the choir directed by Mesut Cemil. The Anatolian Agency was established in 1920. According to the memoirs of ‹hsan Barlas, who worked in the agency between 1923 and 1951, it was a jointventure of Turkey with the French Havas and the British Reuter news agencies. It was the main source of news in Turkey for a long time. Even after the abolishment of the joint-venture, the Anatolian Agency as the only news agency in Turkey was highly dependent on foreign agencies for its output. In accordance with the special agreement continuing with both Havas and Reuter, the news items were bought from them to be translated and disseminated by the Anatolian Agency (1987). Radio was connected to the General Bureau of Press by a law enacted in 1940. This practically meant that all the programming on radio was guided and closely controlled by the state (Hasan Refik Ertu¤ 1951). Telsiz, no.18, 14 November 1927. The only exception to this was the questionnaire on radio that the journal Yeni Adam conducted in 1941. Although it does not rest on a sound methodology, and although there is no clue as to its comprehensiveness, the results still provide some information about the reactions of the radio listeners then. The survey included 6,639 people and contained multiple-choice questions on existing programmes as well as open-ended questions for new suggestions. Radyo, vol.7, no.78-80, June-August 1948, p.3, 39-46. ‘Radyonun ‹çtimai Sahadaki Önemi,’ Radyo, vol.7, no.83-4, November/December 1948, p.1. Burhan Belge, ‘Radyoda Türk Sesi,’ Yeni Adam, no.171, 8 April 1937, p.9. For example, in Australia the broadcasting, which had started at the beginning of the 1920s, had already adopted ‘a special style of radio performance’ at the beginning of the 1930s that was friendly and intimate in its style and avoided talking and lecturing to an unseen audience. Appropriate ways of addressing the segmented audience were developed (Johnson, 1988). In the USA, ethnic speech patterns were essential in the entertainment programmes of the American NBC, despite the emphasis on ‘general American speech’ in the 1940s (Barfield 1996). Turkish Radio interestingly resembled that of the Soviet Union, in which there was little need to assess audiences until the 1950s, since ‘those in charge of broadcasting naturally would have the best interests of the public in mind’ (Browne 1989: 286). It would indeed be interesting to compare Turkish Radio with the revolutionary radio of the Soviet Union in this period. Radio presenters were employed based on a special exam after 1940. They were further trained by tutors in ‘Turkish language, grammar, literature, and pro-

NOTES

84 85 86

87 88 89

90 91

92

93 94

219

nunciation’ (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 199). The broadcasters I interviewed also emphasised that there was much concern that the presenters spoke ‘correct Turkish,’ and that they were trained by tutors from the conservatory. Personal interviews, Mahmut Tali Öngören, 24 January 1996; Turgut Özakman, 25 January 1996. ‹smay›l Hakk› Baltac›o¤lu, ‘‹flkence Kutusu,’ Yeni Adam, no.600, 27 June 1946. ‹smay›l Hakk› Baltac›o¤lu, ‘Radyofonik ile Radyojenik,’ Yeni Adam, no.327, 3 April 1941. It is noteworthy that even much later, after the nationalisation in 1945, issues of radio broadcasting — music, drama and, of course, news — were being fiercely debated in the National Assembly (Cemal Yorulmaz, ‘Bizde ve Öteki Memleketlerde Radyo,’ 1945, p.333-40, unpublished manuscript). Vedat Nedim Tör said that ‘our criteria for beautiful and good are distorted.’ ‘Ses ve Zevk Sefaleti,’ Radyo, vol.1, no.9, 15 August 1942. Narrated in the memoirs of a sound engineer, Suat Osmano¤lu, ‘Radyo An›lar›,’ Elçin Temel. Hence the paradoxes of recorded voice: ‘Mechanisms for recording and reproduction on the one hand provide a technical body, a framework for representations, and on the other hand, by presenting themselves as a double, constitute a simulacrum of power, destroy the legitimacy of representation’ (Attali 1985: 86). Eflref fiefik, ‘Günün ‹çinden,’ Sezi Ergun, Zehra Kurttekin, 1987. Many intellectuals and elites criticised the news programmes for being dependent on Western sources and not devoting enough space to domestic news. Personal interview, Mahmut Tali Öngören, 24 January 1996. Yakup Kadri, in a letter dated 1939 to his friend Hasan Ali Yücel, apologised that he did not hear the news of Yücel’s appointment to the Ministry of Education since he was away from Ankara: ‘You would say that there is radio. But radio does not give any domestic news. It talks about China, etc, because the Anatolian Agency does not have a domestic news network. Radio just transmits what it gets from Reuter and Havas. So, it makes foreign propaganda within, and does not let one single news go out of the country’ (Eronat 1996: 50). The Non-Aggression Pact signed with Germany in 1941 introduced the principle that press and radio in Turkey functioned according to the spirit of ‘mutual trust.’ Soon thereafter, upon Germany’s request, 26 Turkish-Jewish people working in the Anatolian Agency were made redundant (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 247). Selim Sarper, ‘Ankara Radyosu Milletin Emrinde,’ Radyo, vol.1, no.3, 15 February 1942. BBC Written Archives, ‘Turkish Broadcasts,’ 31 October 1941, E9/37.

Chapter 4 1 The BBC Written Archives, 25 October 1940, From Miss Benzie (Broadcasting Division, MOI) to L.W.Hayes (BBC), E1/1256. 2 The BBC Written Archives, 20 October 1944, ‘Post-War Broadcasting in Turkish,’ E1/1259/2. 3 ‘I propose that the experience of the Holocaust, now thoroughly researched by the historians, should be looked upon as, so to speak, a sociological “laboratory.”

220

4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY The Holocaust has exposed and examined such attributes of our society as are not revealed, hence are not empirically accessible, in “non-laboratory” conditions. In other words, I propose to treat the Holocaust as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society’ (Bauman 1989a: 12). Neither Asa Briggs (1961; 1965; 1970; 1979) nor Scannell and Cardiff (1991), who have produced detailed histories of the BBC, dwell on the specific history of the World Service. The existing records of the BBC World Service are usually based on the memoirs of those who have worked in the service. Among these, the account by Mansell (1982) is the most meticulous and comprehensive one. John MacKenzie finds it very important to analyse the ideological content of the BBC’s domestic output in relation to the empire (1986). See also Taylor (1981) on the connection between propaganda and empire. John Tusa has described the World Service as ‘strong, independent, credible, effective and influential.’ All of these characteristics owe to the fact that the BBC was ‘an institution which takes its stand on editorial independence and impartiality’ (1992: 15). Andrew Walker in his A Skyful of Freedom: 60 Years of the BBC World Service regards the World Service as a ‘champion of freedom’ (1992). ‘BBC Memorandum’ (cited in Mansell 1982: 12-3). ‘Old ways and the old self-sufficiency were swept aside as solutions to the problems of swift expansion had to be improvised and fresh minds addressed themselves to the new task of speaking to foreign audiences’ (Mansell 1982: 96) BBC Written Archives, 8 October 1939, ‘Interview with Professor Rusbrook Williams,’ R13/204. BBC Written Archives, ‘Monthly Intelligence Report,’ 19 August 1940, E2/425. The German and Turkish governments signed a Non-Aggression Pact on 18 June 1941. This treaty kept Turkey out of the war in Europe and protected the Germans’ flank for the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. BBC Written Archives, July 1941, ‘Monthly Intelligence Report,’ E2/425. BBC Written Archives, 20 August 1941, ‘Propaganda to Turkey,’ E1/1259/1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. BBC Written Archives, September 1941, ‘Monthly Intelligence Report,’ E2/425. BBC Written Archives, 31 October 1941, ‘Turkish Broadcasts,’ E9/37. Ibid. BBC Written Archives, 18 November 1941, ‘Notes on BBC Comments on M.O.I. Suggestions for Turkish Broadcasts,’ E1/1259/1. Ibid. BBC Written Archives, 31 October 1941, ‘Turkish Broadcasts,’ E9/37. BBC Written Archives, 18 November 1941, E1/1259/1. BBC Written Archives, 7 May 1942, ‘General Editorial Guidance for BBC Turkish Service,’ E1/1259/1. Ibid. BBC Written Archives, June 1941, ‘Monthly Intelligence Report,’ E2/425. BBC Written Archives, 1940, British Information Office to the BBC, E9/37. BBC Written Archives, 17 January 1940, From Prof. Arnold Toynbee to the BBC, E9/37. BBC Written Archives, 1940, From British Information Office to the BBC, E9/37.

NOTES

221

29 BBC Written Archives, May 1940, ‘Answers to Questionnaire from Mr. Lawrence of the BBC on Turkish News,’ E9/37. 30 BBC Written Archives, 27 May 1940, ‘Broadcasting Material for Turkey,’ R13/204. 31 BBC Written Archives, 13 February 1941, ‘Monthly Intelligence Report,’ part II, para.17, E2/425. 32 BBC Written Archives, 27 April 1940, From H. M. Burton (British Information Office) to J. Lawrence, E9/37. 33 BBC Written Archives, 14 March 1940, From British Embassy to MOI, E9/37. 34 BBC Written Archives, 27 March 1940, ‘English Lessons in Turkish Transmission,’ E9/37. 35 BBC Written Archives, 23 July 1941, From S. Hillelson (BBC) to H. Hurst (MOI) with a reference to ‘BBC Internal Circulating Memo,’ 2 April 1940, E9/37. 36 BBC Written Archives, 29 July 1941, From S. Hillelson (BBC) to H. Hurst (MOI), E9/37. 37 BBC Written Archives, 2 April 1940, ‘BBC Internal Circulating Memo,’ E9/37. 38 BBC Written Archives, 20 August 1941, ‘Propaganda to Turkey,’ E1/1259/1 39 BBC Written Archives, 31 October 1941, ‘Turkish Broadcasts,’ E9/37. 40 BBC Written Archives, 22 November 1941, ‘Mrs. Talbot Rice’s suggestions,’ E1/259/1. 41 BBC Written Archives, 3 March 1942, From MOI to BBC, E9/37. 42 BBC Written Archives, 19 May 1941, ‘Turkish Intelligence,’ R13/204. 43 BBC Written Archives, 7 March 1942, From BBC to MOI, E9/37. 44 BBC Written Archives, 7 March 1942, From MOI to BBC, E9/37. 45 BBC Written Archives, 31 October 1941, ‘Turkish Broadcasts,’ E9/37. 46 A London Branch of the Turkish People’s Houses was opened at the beginning of the 1940s. Brigadier-General Sir Wyndham Deedes gave a special speech on the BBC on occasion of the opening of the London People’s House. He included in his speech all the points he imagined the Turkish wanted to hear: ‘It would not, I think, be an exaggeration to say that there is no example in history — at all events I know of none — in which a country has carried out such radical reforms in so short a space of time — a bare twenty years — with, let me add, so little domestic disturbance …’ Deedes talked about how Ankara represented a break with the past, how the new dress code introduced a Western style, and how women were emancipated. He especially dwelled on the role of the People’s Houses: ‘So typical is it of modern Turkey that we got permission a year ago to open one here in London.’ BBC Written Archives, ‘Turkey Today,’ broadcast on Eastern Service Red Network, 23 January 1943. Actually, Deedes was very popular with the Turkish audience. He received letters from Turkish people with his name spelled in the way it sounded in Turkish: ‘Dim diz efendi’. Personal interview with Andrew Mango, 8 December 1995. 47 BBC Written Archives, 1942, From Controller Overseas Publicity to Ivone Kirkpatrick (BBC), R34/904. 48 BBC Written Archives, 22 July 1942, ‘Suggestions Regarding Service of “Local” Turkish and Iranian News,’ E9/37. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid.

222

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

52 BBC Written Archives, 1940, ‘Notes for the BBC by Richard Stokes,’ E9/37. 53 BBC Written Archives, 15 November 1941, ‘Comments on Report on Turkish Service,’ E9/37. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 BBC Written Archives, 9 October 1941, From Neville Barbour (Near East Intelligence Officer), E1/259/1. 59 BBC Written Archives, 9 July 1941, ‘Overseas Divisional Meeting,’ R13/204. 60 BBC Written Archives, 5 August 1942, ‘Staff Recruitment for Turkish Service,’ R13/204. 61 For example, the inauguration of the BBC Turkish broadcasts had been regarded by the Turkish as ‘an act of courtesy.’ BBC Written Archives, 5 December 1939, From MOI to BBC, E9/37. 62 BBC Written Archives, 25 March 1942, From BBC to MOI, E1/1257. 63 Rice from MOI sent to the BBC the poem that she had ‘discovered’. BBC Written Archives, 30 March 1942, ‘Ibn er Rumi’s Poem on the Turks’, E1/1257. 64 Ibid. 65 BBC Written Archives, 5 April 1942, From BBC to MOI, E1/1257. 66 BBC Written Archives, 17 June 1941, From The British Council rep. in Ankara, E9/37. 67 BBC Written Archives, 5 December 1939, BBC Internal Circulating Memo, ‘Turkish Broadcast Reactions,’ E9/37. 68 BBC Written Archives, 14 July 1942, ‘Turkish Service Meeting,’ E1/259/1. 69 Ibid. 70 BBC Written Archives, 28 June 1942, From MOI to BBC, E9/37. 71 BBC Written Archives, 19 May 1942, ‘Questionnaire for Turkey,’ E9/37. 72 BBC Written Archives, 5 October 1942, ‘Criticism of Turkish Broadcasts,’ E9/37. 73 BBC Written Archives, 13 April 1943, From BBC to MOI, E1/1257. 74 BBC Written Archives, 25 January 1945, From BBC to Press Office, British Embassy in Ankara, E1/1257. 75 BBC Written Archives, 31 October 1941, ‘Turkish Broadcasts,’ E9/37. 76 Ibid. 77 The criticism could not be easily disregarded, especially when they came from, for example, the most pro-British people in Turkey. Zekeriya Sertel was one of them. He was the editor of the newspaper Tan, known for its pro-British attitude. Sertel had been vigilant in his criticism not only about the language of the BBC broadcasts, but also about the content, such as the news items: ‘With reference to the manner of working there certainly seems to be something radically wrong but I do not venture to say anything, that is really the internal workings of the BBC. As I understand the subject matter is being given out according to measure and items are being added to fill the gap ... the most essential thing to be followed in this measuring is the quality of the substance which should be given in a clear language free from propaganda.’ BBC Written Archives, September 1942, ‘Remarks passed by Turkish journalists on their visit to the BBC Aldenham,’ E9/37.

NOTES

223

78 BBC Written Archives, 7 May 1948, ‘Language of Turkish Service,’ R13/204. 79 Ibid. 80 BBC Written Archives, 14 September 1942, ‘Turkish Service: Tristram’s note on language difficulties,’ E1/259/1. 81 Ibid. 82 BBC Written Archives, 2 April 1943, From British Council, Ankara to British Council, London, E1/259/1. 83 BBC Written Archives, 11 July 1947, from Valerie Gordon Smith to all Turkish announcers. 84 BBC Written Archives, 1948, ‘Memorandum on Standards of Language and Translation in the Turkish Service of the BBC,’ R13/204. 85 Personal Interview, 8 February 1995. 86 Yet, Mango, at the time, had doubts about the use of populist policies: ‘The inauguration of Istanbul Radio (1948) will probably mean that we shall lose many of our “lighter” listeners who are mainly attracted by our two weekly programmes of Turkish music ... we cannot compete with Turkish state broadcasting in the fields of Turkish as well as of Western music.’ BBC Written Archives, 7 October 1949, ‘Istanbul Radio,’ E1/1258. 87 Among many developments in the aftermath of the war, Turkey’s membership to the Council of Europe on 9 August 1949 is relevant to the discussion here. 88 BBC Written Archives, 19 October 1949, R13/204. 89 BBC Written Archives, 5 July 1949, E1/1259/3. 90 This could also mean that Eastern European countries were simultaneously being orientalised and positioned half-way between the Orient and Europe. 91 BBC Written Archives, 14 July 1951, ‘Turkey: Report on a visit from 23 May 1951 to 19 June 1951 by John Mair, Turkish Programme Organiser,’ E1/1260. 92 BBC Written Archives, 14 July 1951, ‘Turkey: Report on a visit from 23 May 1951 to 19 June 1951 by John Mair, Turkish Programme Organiser.’ 93 The Controller of Overseas Services wrote in 1942: ‘I wonder if there is any service over which there has been so much vacillation, in both policy and practical fields.’ BBC Written Archives, 4 June 1942, E9/37. 94 BBC Written Archives, 28 July 1955, From Acting Chief Publicity Officer to London Military Attache, E9/37. 95 Representations should be regarded as social facts according to Paul Rabinow, since they serve to make sense of the life world (1986: 257). 96 One of the presenters of Turkish Radio, and later the TRT, tells in her memoirs that the concept of autonomy was a source of inspiration for many Turkish broadcasters during the drafting of the new law on radio and television in the early 1960s, albeit its content could never be substantialised. ‘None of us knew what autonomy meant,’ she wrote, but ‘we kept saying, “we are now autonomous”’ (Gülizar 1994: 146). 97 BBC Written Archives, 26 July 1955, E12/974/1. 98 BBC Written Archives, 12 December 1967, E1/2,432/1. 99 The report from the British Information Office in 1940 concerning a Turkish man, claiming that he was a Jew but that ‘he [was] a very good type, and one would not suspect, from his personal appearance, that he was either a Turk or a Jew!’ could be cited as an example. BBC Written Archives, 1940, From British Information Office to BBC, E9/37.

224

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

100 BBC Written Archives, 7 August 1942, ‘Interview with Turkish Ambassador,’ E9/37. 101 BBC Written Archives, 4 September 1959, ‘Relations with Turkish Radio,’ E1/2,432/1. 102 Friendly relations continued with the BBC, despite doubts and earlier discontents. For example, in 1956 Naci Serez, Programme Director of Ankara Radio, offered the BBC a suggestion for a programme that he himself had designed, ‘in return for the most helpful co-operation we always had, especially from the Turkish Section.’ The BBC had no intention of taking a programme suggestion from the Turks but did not neglect to ‘enquire for further details, thereby showing some interest.’ BBC Written Archives, 30 January 1956, E1/2, 432/1. It is significant that a Turkish broadcaster had a self-image built on a misconception, while the BBC could be politely indifferent to the suggestion, while this would not have been so easy a decade ago, given the constant search for material related to Turkish culture. 103 BBC Written Archives, 1 July 1937, BBC Internal Circulating Memo, E1/1256. 104 BBC Written Archives, 9 November 1937, BBC Internal Circulating Memo, E1/1258. 105 BBC Written Archives, 20 October 1944, ‘Post-War Broadcasting in Turkish,’ E1/1259/2. 106 BBC Written Archives, August 1941, Monthly Intelligence Report, E2/425. 107 BBC Written Archives, 24 September 1942, E1/1257. 108 BBC Written Archives, 23 September 1940, ‘Conversation with Mr.Lubin of Imperial Chemical Industries,’ E9/37. 109 BBC at War, a handbook written by Antonia White and published by the BBC emphasises the scientific methods through which the listeners’ interests were investigated during wartime (p.25, emphasis added). There is a predominant claim in Britain that the World Service worked, and continues to work, for humanistic purposes (Mansell 1982; Tusa 1992; Walker 1992). According to Walker, the BBC gained a ‘golden reputation’ during wartime (1992: 12). 110 Agamben has pointed to the changing role of ‘mediating imagination’ in history: ‘For Antiquity, the imagination which is now expunged from knowledge as “unreal”, was the supreme medium of knowledge’ (1993: 24); but in the modern world, ‘the function of phantasy is assumed by the new subject of knowledge: the ego cogito’ (1993: 25). 111 John MacKenzie has noted that the BBC between 1923 and 1953 operated in a political climate that would not tolerate anything that attacked ‘Britain’s complacent sense of superiority’ (1986: 187). In the mid-1940s, the BBC propagated the idea that ‘England is the single country in the world that, looking after its own interests with meticulous care, has at the same time something to give to others’ (cited in MacKenzie 1986: 177). 112 Orhan Koçak has argued that the Turkish modernists had ‘an uneasy consciousness that attempted to hide from itself its very pretensions’ (1995: 20). 113 Selim Sarper, ‘Biraz da Onlar Bizi Dinlese,’ Radyo, vol.1, no.8, 15 July 1942, p.2. 114 Ibid. 115 Radyo, vol.1, no.2, 15 January 1942, p.42. 116 Radyo, vol.1, no.5, 15 April 1942, p.32.

NOTES

225

117 The Turkish government maintained strict control over the press during the war. Not only the content of the news was dictated directly by the government, but also a number of laws and press regulations imposed fines and jail sentence on writers who published articles that went against the public confidence of the state and state officials. The interest in foreign news was a way of directing attention to foreign affairs instead of domestic ones under the practices of heavy censorship (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 224-5; Weisband 1973: 72-3). 118 Yurchak has discussed the similar paradox of the Soviet state’s policy toward Westernised cultural forms and ideas. According to his account, the Soviet state ‘introduced various new technologies that contributed to the production and dissemination of these cultural forms and ideas, while at the same time trying to contain their negative effects’ (2006: 175). Yurchak also refers to different practices of jamming foreign broadcasting in this context (178). 119 ‘Radyo An›lar›,’ Elçin Temel. 120 As discussed in the previous chapter, Ankara Radio was mainly dependent on foreign agencies for its world news through the Anatolian Agency. According to Kocabaflo¤lu, the penetration of German DNB news was about 25 per cent, while the British Reuter’s amounted to nearly 50 per cent (1980: 247). Suat Osmano¤lu’s memoirs also point to the influence of the USA. According to his account, Ankara Radio showed its cooperation by taping significant talks, such as those of Roosevelt on American radio, and distributed them to Turkish newspapers. ‘Radyo An›lar›,’ Elçin Temel. 121 ‹zzettin Tu¤rul Niflbay, ‘Hasan Ferit Alnar,’ Radyo, vol.2, no.16, 15 March 1943, p.4. Chapter 5 1 Ramiz, Radyo, vol.2, no.14, 15 January 1943, p.23. 2 The percentage of verbal programmes was very low between 1927 and 1936, approximately 14 per cent. Koçabaflo¤lu compares this f›gure with several European stations, such as Viennese Radio and the BBC, where the percentage of verbal programmes was never below 25 per cent (1980: 73). 3 Verbal programmes reached approximately 30 per cent of total airtime. 4 A group of ‘experts’ devised a news programme under the name Radio Gazette. The programme mostly devoted time to foreign news and aimed to discuss a number of issues in the foreign broadcasts through the prism of ‘truth and conscience’ (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 226). 5 Nadir Nadi, ‘Ankara Radyo ‹stasyonu Faaliyete Geçmeden,’ Cumhuriyet, 23 July 1938. 6 Yeni Ses, November 1939, p.23; Sefer Aytekin, ‘Köy Radyolar›ndan ‹stifade Edilemiyor,’ Yeni Adam, no.252, 26 October 1939, p.5. 7 Most of the readers’ concerns were around radio’s former status as serving the rich. They thought that radio had to address the people — that is, the poor and the rural population in Turkey — if the new mission of the radio was going to be accomplished. Populist concerns were coupled with concerns to put radio in the service of Turkish revolutionary principles. One reader echoed the official rhetoric and said that radio must be active in ‘kneading the society with the principles of ink›lap, spreading Turkish culture and making the world hear the Turkish voice.’ Cumhuriyet, 12 January 1937.

226

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

8 Muzaffer fierif, ‘Radyonun Sosyal Psikolojisi,’ Olufl, vol.1, no.4, 22 January 1939, p.59. 9 Journals such as Yeni Adam and Yeni Ses criticised the language used in the radio programmes, arguing that it was not accessible to those with lower levels of education. 10 The artificiality of the talks — the subject-matters, language and style — were criticised by the intellectuals of the period, among which Baltac›o¤lu was a consistent voice. Yeni Adam, no.252, 26 October 1939, p.2, 5. 11 Also published as books: Selim S›rr›, Radyo Konferanslar›m (My Radio Talks), 1932; Kaz›m Nami Duru, Ankara Radyosunda Söylediklerim (What I said on Ankara Radio), 1937; Dr. Behçet Kamay, Radyo Konferanslar›: Sa¤l›k ve Sosyal Bahisler (Radio Conferences: Health and Social Issues), 1941; Dr. Galip Ataç, Radyoda Evin Saati (Home’s Hour on Radio), 1943; Dr. Celal Ertu¤, Radyoda Pazar Sohbetleri (Sunday Chats on Radio), 1945. 12 In 1925, he himself performed his zeybek with a female student of his on the stage for Mustafa Kemal, who appreciated the dance and asked him to perform it once more with his dinner jacket. After the performance, Mustafa Kemal addressed the audience: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen! Mr. Selim S›rr› gave a civilised form to zeybek as he revived it ... We can now say to Europeans that we have a perfect dance and we can perform it in salons and on stage. The Zeybek dance can and should be performed in every social setting together with women’ (Tarcan 1948: 3). 13 His weekly talks were first broadcast in the mornings, but later moved to the evening; after 1944, they were broadcast three times a week, until his death in 1947. 14 Vedat Nedim Tör, ‘Galip Ataç,’ Radyo, vol.2, no.13, 15 December 1942, p.6. 15 Ibid. 16 Baki Süha, ‘Evin Saati Muharriri Dr. Galip Ataç’la Bir Saat,’ Radyo, vol.1, no.9, 15 August 1942, p.9. 17 He said, ‘You would be amazed by those letters that come from the listeners. All kinds of complaints, from their husbands, sons or mothers-in-law ... Some would write pages just because of a pimple … Some complain of their landlords or neighbours ...’ ‘Evin Saati Muharriri Dr. Galip Ataç’la Bir Saat,’ Radyo, vol.1, no.9, 15 August 1942, p.9. 18 ‘Although “we know very well” that we are people like others — at the same time consider ourselves to be “people of a special mould, made of special stuff” — as individuals who participate in the fetish of the Object-Party, direct embodiment of the Will of History’ (Zizek 1996: 252). 19 Lacey has argued that the history of radio ‘had been the history of a development away from intellectualism to maternalism,’ which resonates in dialogue, drama and human interest. She has also linked this to the location of radio in the home, its intimate address and its sensory appeal, which grounds radio in the female realm. In Nazi Germany, radio’s true spirit was Muttergeist (Lacey 1993:118-9). The new imaginary of government that evoked maternal authority — that is, the government of the people with an analogy to the government at home — has close parallels with Foucault’s discussion of governmentality. However, Foucault has neglected the gendered dimensions of governmentality. 20 The trope of love in regulating masculinity and femininity in the modern fami-

NOTES

21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28 29 30 31

32

33

227

ly and in a heterosexual paradigm has been examined by scholars as a realm of historical and sociological study. See Najmabadi (1998), Sirman (2000), Surkis (2006). I find this similar to Chatterjee’s emphasis on the discovery of ‘tradition’ in Bengal nationalism (1993b). For example, Lacey has illustrated how the Nazi regime in Germany invested mothers with national duties through radio broadcasting (1993), which in turn contributed to a ‘science’ of motherhood. In the first decades of the Turkish Republic, certain aspects of Ottoman patriarchy were condemned: ‘the remote, authoritarian father figure began giving way to a new intimacy and paternal involvement’ (Kandiyoti 1997a: 123). See Sirman’s article for an exploration of this difference between aflk and sevgi with a significant impact on women’s subjectivities (2000). Sheila Hannah Katz has made a similar point, that ‘women were imagined good or bad according to how much they helped or hindered men in achieving their goals’ within the newly forming national Jewish and Arab identities at the turn of the century (1996: 91). For example, according to him, the ‘sickly’ and melancholic alaturka music was the product of women’s absence in public life (Selim S›rr› 1932: 271). According to Baltac›o¤lu, the rights given to women by the Turkish Republic symbolise the authenticity of the Turkish Revolution; it shows that it was not a mere imitation of European societies. ‘Yeni Devletin Kültür Programlar›,’ Yeni Adam, vol.2. no.66. 4 April 1935. For example, Halide Edip’s novels are highly significant since they evoke the very problematic terrain of women’s sexuality. See Ah›ska (1996), Sirman (2000). ‘Nader draws our attention to the fact that “Occidentalism,” and its related demonology (materialism, anomie, immorility, etc.), is used as a mechanism of social control over Middle Eastern women’ (cited in Kandiyoti 1993: 385). Similarly, Ertu¤ has mentioned the importance of medical doctors, in his talks, for ‘seeing through’ people (1945). It was one of the principles of the People’s Houses not to admit young children to meetings: ‘There will be no little children in the meetings and performances in the People’s Houses. Since the goal of the People’s Houses is the high ideal of development, children should not be allowed to disturb the silence and the order.’ CHP Halkevleri Ö¤rene¤i, 1935, Ankara, p.22. The analogy between the child and the nation was not a rare theme in the national discourse. Nafi At›f said in an article on discipline and education in the People’s Houses’ main journal Ülkü that the new pedagogical perspectives treated the child as separate from the adult, and not as a smaller version of the adult. He argued that this perception implicated an analogy to the Turkish nation: ‘The Turkish nation, by severing itself from all the ties that hindered its survival and growth, is getting ready to show the originality of its body [constitution].’ ‘Terbiye Anlay›fl›nda ‹lerleyifl,’ Ülkü, vol.1, no.1, February 1933. It is interesting that the originality of the Turkish nation was fixed in its childhood, which is categorically inferior to adulthood in terms of much-valued development. Nurdan Gürbilek has analysed the anxiety of imitation, together with the anxiety of feminisation as part of the process of Westernisation, as it manifests itself

228

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

in Turkish novels and writings in the early Repuplican era (2004). 34 Dyson has argued that ‘the ideal radio voice represents the world for the listener from the anechoic space of the studio — a space which acoustically is, in the jargon of sound technicians, “dead” ... Distortion and interference, on the other hand, suggest a reduction of presence through contact with the external world, by aurally evoking another place and time, the illusion that the voice is “present” with the listener. Sound technology echoes these beliefs. In fact, the success of microphone design is measured in terms of the credibility of the presence it simulates, indicated by the clarity, the central stereophonic perspective, the volume, crispness and articulation of the voice it amplifies’ (1994: 178, 179). 35 Duru talked about the Turkish language that would not only influence ‘those remainders of other communities,’ but even ‘the foreigners, who would come running to our country to learn our language, and to know our culture. Then the Turkish land would be the centre of the civilisation in the world’ (1937: 73). 36 I use the term ‘involuntarily’ here, because, contrary to Ernest Renan’s welcomed idea of the ‘will to nationhood’ (1990) in Turkey, the national identity was the product of a complex process. In Bhabha’s terms, ‘identification of the subject of cultural discourse is dialogical or transferential in the style of psychoanalysis. It is constituted through the locus of the Other which suggests both that the object of identification is ambivalent, and, more significantly, that the agency of identification is never pure or holistic but always constituted in a process of substitution, displacement or projection’ (1990: 313). 37 ‘In the first decades of the republic, the modernity of the new state was most eloquently signaled through images of women that became central to the iconography of the regime’ (Kandiyoti 1997a: 125). 38 Not only was the day on which the national parliament was founded (23 April) turned in a national children’s holiday, children also continue to signify the nation in many other media. 39 Radyo, vol.2, no.16, 15 March 1943, p.21. Chapter 6 1 Hayri Esen in ‘Radyo An›lar›,’ Elçin Temel. 2 In the play, an ex-officer was heard talking negatively about the Turkish army at a dinner table, but in fact his intention was to provoke and hook a spy by his words. Hayri Esen, ‘Radyo An›lar›,’ Elçin Temel. 3 The impact was due to affect more than reason; hence, the way in which radio drama influenced men can be described as feminine. Just as there was an anxiety in Turkish society that women were prone to the ‘extreme and negative’ influences of novels (Gürbilek 2004), it seems that men were not exempt from the ‘extreme’ influences of fiction. 4 In a document entitled ‘Post-War Broadcasting in Turkish,’ Mitchell stresses that ‘the primary appeal of our broadcasts will continue to lie in their news content.’ The BBC Written Archives, 20 October 1944, E1/1259/2. 5 Although the news and the news programmes consisted of approximately 60 per cent of the verbal programmes towards the end of the 1940s, the amount of domestic news, features and documentaries were negligible in comparison to foreign news (Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 224). 6 In 1949, the BBC sent a copy of The Right Way of Radio Play Writing — this is

NOTES

7 8

9

10

11 12 13

14

229

the title as it appears in the archive document; the correct name of the book should be How to Write Broadcast Plays, 1932 — by Val Gielgud (with the author’s autograph on the first page) to Ankara Radio upon its request for advise on ‘educational programmes.’ The BBC Written Archives, 24 November 1949, E1/1258. The BBC Written Archives, From Donald Stephenson to Adnan Öztrak, 21 March 1966, E1/2,432/1. Discussions on the quality of radio dramas were never absent in Turkish Radio. The BBC was also highly skeptical of the conception of radio dramas in Turkey. A 1948 audience research of the BBC Turkish Service in Turkey conveyed that there was ‘some demand for plays, although the vagueness of the suggestions shows that many listeners are not accustomed to this form of entertainment.’ The suggestions ranged from ‘village and family plays’ to ‘vaudeville, comedies’ and Hamlet. These reflected, according to the BBC, the poor nature of the drama output on Turkish Radio. BBC Written Archives, 15 March 1949, ‘BBC Eastern Services Bi-Monthly Service Report,’ E1/1257. According to Jordanova, the Enlightenment dichotomies (such as nature and culture) that informed the opposition of man to woman, rather than representing the diverse lived experiences, express the ‘interests of the small but influential elite which generated the literature. It was a programme of reform to create a universe which did not yet exist. Nor did it or could it ever exist. The normative intentions and the stereotyped categories bore little relationship to the messiness and programmatic complexity of lived experience for the majority of the population’ (1995: 64). The audience survey of Ankara Radio in 1948 included several comments on radio dramas. Replying to the questions ‘Do you like radio dramas?’ and ‘Which topics do you want to be covered by them?’ 1,059 of a total of 6,639 people said that they liked them, 162 did not like them, 417 demanded more radio dramas, 4 demanded less radio dramas, and 12 did not want dramas. In terms of subjectmatter, 1,810 wanted ‘ethical, social, family tragedies and emotional subjects,’ 1,609 wanted ‘national subjects,’ 106 wanted just ‘dramas,’ and 513 wanted ‘comedies.’ The vagueness in the answers shows that dramas were not neatly categorised in terms of genre at Ankara Radio. However, content-wise ‘family’ and ‘national’ dramas were privileged. Mustafa Kemal had already said that ‘the essence of civilisation, the ground for progress and power reside in family life’ (cited in And 1983: 3). The People’s Houses regarded drama, for example, as ‘the best means to suggest to the people all those beautiful, good, and true feelings and knowledge.’ Halkevleri 1932-1935: 103 Halkevi Geçen Y›llarda Nas›l Çal›flt›?, p.15. Mustafa Kemal edited the language of the plays, in particular, to make sure that it was ‘new’ Turkish. But he also made remarks on content. For example, he made some alterations to the script of Tafl Bebek, which portrayed a woman as ‘doll-like.’ He emphasised: ‘We cannot think of women in this way any more! The existence of women constitutes the infrastructure of the nation in many aspects! From now on the conception of women as pretty objects should change.’ Also, he disliked the idea that ‘love is entertainment.’ He said: ‘We should take love seriously’ (cited in And 1983: 9). Women always had a special role to play with regard to civilisation. For exam-

230

15

16

17

18 19

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY ple, the civil rights given to women in Turkey were regarded as ‘proof’ of civilisation. The nationalist propaganda portrayed women as active participants of society. But these images were mostly reserved for urban women. Women in the rural hinterland were depicted as naturally traditional and immobile (Kandiyoti 1997a: 117-8). A prominent spokesperson of Kemalism has put this rather bluntly in his memoirs: ‘Mustafa Kemal did not force the peasant women to change. Maybe this was the only exemption in his revolutions. He even tolerated polygamy in the rural areas’ (Atay 1969: 412). Thus, the ambiguity concerning women as markers of modernity was based on a division along class and regional lines. Furthermore, the ruling class was formed by recruiting higherclass women instead of lower-class men (Öncü 1981). The concerns of class consolidation produced differences among women in that context. Yet, ‘woman’ persisted as a symbol for many aspects of the new nation. The post-imperial ‘national’ identity was struck by ‘crises of gender and domestic organisation’ (Kandiyoti 1997a: 116). These crises, according to Kandiyoti, were centred on establishing a heterosexual marital etiquette with special emphasis on the child-centred conjugal family. This was supposed to put an end to the diversity of sexual preferences, to the differences in family life across the national space, and to the existence of extra-marital and homosexual sexualities of men under the Ottoman regime. There was also concern for promoting a transition from the dictates of Islamic law to those of the secular family code in the early Turkish history. ‘Islamic regulations of the body and social space were increasingly being encroached upon by a new discourse that removed the body from the realm of the sacred to medicalize and secularize it’ (Ibid). In the mid-1920s, German Radio broadcast experimental plays named Hörspiel, which privileged the aural over the visual and freed itself from theatre. Many critics (such as Döblin, Benjamin and Brecht) wrote in this period about the possibilities of radio as a medium. The form of the Hörspiel was banned in Germany between 1933 and 1945, and its producers were forced to leave German Radio. It could only return to radio after a long silence, and its ‘classical’ period is considered to be between 1947 and 1960. The examples of Hörspiel in this period dealt with questions such as alienation, fear, solitude, and loss of identity in post-war Germany. See Priessnitz 1981, Cory 1992. It is interesting that the words of Lewis concerning the lack of interest in radio drama in Britain nevertheless sets the BBC as the canon: ‘None of the people one might expect to be sufficiently enthusiastic about the subject to research it and write about it — dramatic critics, literary scholars, cultural historians, sociologists of the mass media — have shown much interest in it, especially in Britain, even though BBC Radio has serious claims to provide the best radio service in the world and is the envy of many countries. It is therefore extremely ironic that scholars from Germany, which also has very high standards of broadcasting, should have not only spearheaded the academic study of British radio drama but also virtually monopolised it until very recently’ (1981: 1). The BBC Drama Department mostly broadcast stage plays with the aim of ‘taking the theatre to the people.’ It acted, in Priessnitz’s terms, as a ‘National Repertory Theatre of the Air’ (Priessnitz 1981: 32). In the 1940s, radio dramas on Turkish Radio were mostly produced and performed by the radio staff. But the members of the Drama Department of the

NOTES

20

21

22

23 24 25

26 27

231

Conservatory were also invited to perform some of their plays for radio. When radio dramas started to be broadcast twice a week, professional and amateur writers were encouraged to write plays for radio to increase the supply. Between 1941 and 1942, about 650 plays were received, but only 76 accepted. This has to be considered in relation to the existence of heavy censorship. For example, Kimgil Ailesi and Rektörün Odac›s› were two prominent dramatic series of educational value. The former was a twenty-minute series broadcast every Sunday at 9:00 pm. It was based on the life story of a large, typical middle-class family (written by Neriman H›z›r, a psychologist educated in the USA and also the producer of children’s programmes on radio) and dealt with the everyday problems of family life. The latter, written by Vala Nureddin, took as its hero an uneducated porter who worked in the university and represented the authentic, intuitive, simple and true knowledge of the ordinary people in an environment of high culture. The Features Department of the BBC set up an experimental studio to explore the specific expressive possibilities of radio. This was stimulated by the Columbia Broadcasting System’s Columbia Workshop (Priessnitz 1981: 34). For a detailed account of features and social documentaries on the BBC, see Scannell and Cardiff (1991: 134-52). They have discussed how the novel concept of actuality and the stress on the factual were linked to the representation of reality. In 1932, an article in Radio Times emphasised that ‘[n]ew techniques are needed, that do not rely simply on commentators, not to come between the real stuff and the listeners, but to help reality out’ (cited in Scannell and Cardiff 1991: 145). However, the authors have also demonstrated the procedures through which reality was processed according to a certain design. ‘We soon realized that one of the first jobs of the feature programme in wartime was to explain the enemy, to shake off the polite fictions of diplomacy, and to convert in the public mind “leading figures of a friendly state” to the gangsters and assassins of a well-armed foe.’ Laurence Gilliam, ‘The Radio Documentary in Wartime,’ BBC Yearbook 1945. According to Goffman, ‘sound substitutes become conventionalised for what would ordinarily be conveyed visually’ (1980: 163). Kemal Tözem, ‘Rektörün Odac›s›,’ Radyo, vol.2, no.21, 15 August 1943, p.11. Baltac›o¤lu complained that Ankara Radio refused many of his plays because of their subject-matter. ‘Those who control the content of radio dramas have fallen prey to suspicion ... Is this obscene? Is there a suicidal theme? Is there an antiregime sentiment? I know, because quite a few of my plays have been rejected because of this suspicion.’ Baltac›o¤lu, ‘Radyo Program›,’ Yeni Adam, no.502, 10 August 1944, p.2. ‘Radyofonik Türk Tiyatrosunun Tarihçesi,’ Radyo, vol.1, no.8, 15 July 1942, p.14. The aim that instrumentalised radio drama for national unity and education was different from the BBC Radio Drama Department’s in 1942, which was, by broadcast production, ‘to maintain interest in classic plays, British and foreign, and especially those of Shakespeare; to provide ... theatrical entertainment for lovers of drama cut off by circumstances from the theatre itself; and finally — perhaps most important of all — to encourage the writing of new plays specifically designed for the medium of broadcasting. In the last activity one may rea-

232

28

29

30 31

32 33 34 35

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY sonably include the adaptation for broadcasting of suitable novels and short stories.’ ‘Radio Drama,’ BBC Yearbook 1942, p.40-1. Kemal Tözem, ‘Radyofonik Tiyatro,’ Radyo, vol.1, no.2, 15 January 1942. Tözem’s comments are in contradiction with what Rudolph Arnheim, one of the first scholars who wrote on radio broadcasting, envisioned for radio. He warned against the translation of the aural to the visual: ‘The wireless play is self-sufficient, completes itself in the aural’ (Arnheim 1993: 21). The political emphasis on ‘taking theatre to the people’ in Turkey usually contradicted the conception of the theatre as an icon of modernity and Western way of life. The pioneers responsible for establishing a modern theatre in Turkey had difficulty finding enough people to watch Western plays. (In the early 1930s, a play by August Strindberg had to be performed before an audience of only three people in Istanbul.) Turkish playwrights were newcomers to modern drama and had difficulties with the form. Another problem concerned the behaviour of the theatre audience. People had to be educated in theatre etiquette. A booklet prepared in 1924, by Muhsin Ertu¤rul, the famed veteran director and administrator of the National Theatre Company, warned the potential audience that ‘theatre is not a mere entertainment but a school for adults; people should dress up when going to theatre; they should be quiet all through the play; they should not smoke during the performance; the breaks between the acts have a set duration — impatience does not help; whistling, banging feet, unnecessarily clapping hands are not the proper ways of appreciation’ (And 1983: 46). Robert Mott also speaks of the ‘pains’ of actors taking roles in radio drama in the early days of American broadcasting. Actors experienced difficulties adapting their acting methods for an ‘unseeing audience’ (1990: 3). Kemal Tözem, ‘Alk›fla Hasret,’ Radyo, vol.3, no.29, 15 April 1944, p.12. Tözem recounts that he was surprised to see one day that the actors were in full costume in the studio and demanded to perform as if they were on stage. Radyo published the photographs of the production of the fantastic play called Tarihin Kaybetti¤i K›z (The Girl Whom History Lost). Thus, the gap between the auditory and the visual was temporarily bridged both for the actors and for the audience. Nuri Alt›nok, Radyo ve Sahne, vol.1, no.1, 31 May 1951, p.40. Radyo Oyun Yazarlar› için K›sa Bilgiler, TRT Bas›l› Yay›nlar Müdürlü¤ü Yay›nlar›, p.24. Nezih Manyas, ‘Radyofonik Piyesler Nas›l Yaz›lmal›?,’ Radyo, vol.2, no.18, 15 May 1943, p.16. A set of rules was published by the TRT after the 1960s. (Radyo Oyun Yazarlar› için K›sa Bilgiler, TRT Bas›l› Yay›nlar Müdürlü¤ü Yay›nlar›, p.24). These give an idea of how the ideal reality to be represented was linked to the content of radio drama. The prohibitions regarding radio dramas were: They cannot promote a disrespectful attitude toward the law. They cannot violate social and ethical values. The facts cannot be altered in the treatment of historical events. The name of God cannot be mentioned in a disrespectful manner. The political climate of the country cannot be reflected. Segregationist thoughts cannot be included. Pessimistic events cannot be chosen as subjects.

NOTES

233

People’s physical disabilities cannot be ridiculed. There can be no underrating of any professional group. Suicide should be rarely touched upon, and if so, handled with utmost care. The guilty should not run away from their penalty. 36 This does not mean that all the members of the elite wholeheartedly accepted the actual radio dramas as true representations of reality. There were several criticisms, as part of a general criticism directed against radio broadcasting, concerning the language, style and performance quality of radio dramas. Reflat Nuri Güntekin, a famous novel and playwright, criticised the language of the radio dramas, while Baltac›o¤lu was critical of their artificial tone. Baltac›o¤lu said that, ‘instead of that idealistic verbalism that portrays the purity of villagers, or the self-sacrifice of women, there must be a more vivid and realistic literature that finds its source directly in the ambition for industrialisation and struggle’ (cited in Kocabaflo¤lu 1980: 181). Nevertheless, the assumption that words could directly signify and, thus, construct reality was not contested. The mediations of language and of reception were not acknowledged. 37 The dramas were either broadcast live or recorded on ‘stone’ records. ‹mer told me about several tricks that he used to create a soundscape ‘from nil’ in those productions, such as walking backward to give the effect of climbing the stairs; rubbing starch in his hands to give the effect of walking on snow; and so on. He even barked for thirteen weeks to create a dog in a children’s series. The critics thought it was a real dog. Personal interview, 25 January 1996. 38 According to Crisell (1994), the spirit of radio resides in the fact that studio is a void, an acoustic canvas on which anything can be painted. 39 Interview with Ertu¤rul ‹mer, 25 January 1996. 40 Language, in this sense, comprises the imprints of a continuing struggle; it is heteroglot from top to bottom. Bakhtin wrote that he heard ‘voices in everything and the dialogic relationships between them’ (cited in Shukman 1983). However, the dialogic character of language usually remains hidden in the form of the drama. 41 ‘In drama, for example, the author’s ultimate semantic authority is to be found in the whole work, but may not be expressed by any character’ (Morson and Emerson 1990: 148-9). 42 These dramas — selected from a number of dramas that have been accidentally kept, either in a pile in a storeroom at Ankara Radio, or published in a book — are significant in their realistic attitude in dealing with the crises of the family. They differ from the naive and symbolic dramas in which women are treated only as symbols. 43 Kemal Tözem, ‘Alk›fla Hasret,’ Radyo, vol.3, no.29, 15 April 1944, p.12. 44 Written by Kemal Sönmez, directed by O¤uz Bora, sound effects by Tahsin Temren. I found the soundtrack of the play, which was recorded in 1951, in the storeroom at Ankara Radio. 45 A radio drama written by Vâlâ Nureddin Vâ-nu, ‘Bir Türk fiehrinde ‹mar Çoflkunlu¤u,’ in Antalya ‹kinci Dünya Harbinde Nas›l Güzelleflebildi?, Istanbul: Kenan Matbaas›, 1944. 46 People’s Houses that existed in small towns and villages. 47 ‘Attar: I know you always like to look at the negative aspects too. You would

234

48

49 50

51

52 53

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY say, “Parks, exhibitions, concerts … these are things of fantasy.” But we have also built agricultural installations; we will go and see them another time. We have built a refrigeration system, too’ (76). Lukacs has written; ‘In drama everything must serve to support the basic possible attitudes and concentrate upon one central collision.’ He has argued that ‘the historical character of drama thus concentrates around the historical character of the collision itself in its pure form ...Whatever will not be absorbed directly and completely by the collision will spoil or even ruin the flow of the drama’ (Lukacs 1973: 288, 294, 295). Mücadele Etmeli, a radio drama written by a woman, Mükerrem Kamil Su, who also wrote children’s programmes in the late 1940s, and broadcast in 1949. I found the soundtrack of the drama in the storeroom of Ankara Radio. Of course, this is my interpretation, and different readings can result in different interpretations. However, there seems to be no apparent reason in the text why Füruzan’s emotional reaction to a caged bird is mentioned in the flashback. This can be treated as a clue for something important, given the highly symbolic structure of the text. Metin And (1983) has given an account of almost all plays staged either by the National Theatre or other groups, from 1923 onwards. These plays showed great variety. They were either adaptations of Western plays, or written specifically for the stage by Turkish authors. Their subject-matter also varied. Many dramas on family life portrayed devil-like figures of women who cheated on their husbands, became prostitutes, and so on. The plays usually had tragic endings, such as suicide or murder, which were not allowed on radio. The subjectivities of women could become a public issue in Turkey only in the 1980s, after second-wave feminists focused on the politics of the constitutive divide between private and public realms (Tekeli 1995). Lasch has argued: ‘The absolute reign of the son implies, as its latent content, union with the mother— a union, that is, that acknowledges no impediments, in the form of paternal prohibitions or even in the form of a paternal presence, to its consummation ... In the modern world, groups seem to find their dominant fantasy not in submission to the father but in collective reunion with the mother’ (1985: xiii, xv).

Chapter 7 1 The production and perception of voice — intonation, elocution, tone, inflections and rhythm — also need to be addressed. This should bear on theoretical questions regarding the registers of the subject, which, according to LacoueLabarthe, has been theorised mostly at the level of the specular ignoring the audible (1989). 2 Although Turkey does not really fit into a postcolonial model due to the fact that it was never overtly colonised, we can still argue that it constitutes more or less a proper object for postcolonial criticism if we accept Moore-Gilbert’s broader definition: ‘In my view, postcolonial criticism can still be seen as a more or less distinct set of reading practices, if it is understood as preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon the relations of domination and subordination — economic, cultural and political— between (and often within) nations, races or cultures, which characteris-

NOTES

3 4

5

6

7

8

9

235

tically have their roots in the history of modern European colonialism and imperialism and which, equally characteristically, continue to be apparent in the present era of neo-colonialism’ (1997: 12). See Ça¤lar Keyder (2003) for discussions on how the past has been differently accommodated in the national ideology in different periods, and Halim Kara (2007) for how the Ottoman past figures in modern literature. While Turkey’s potential membership continues to be problematised on a civilisational basis, especially in religious terms, in the EU, the Turkish ruling party AKP has attempted to counter the ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse by a discourse on an ‘alliance of civilisations.’ However, the AKP’s conception of Islamic civilisation is far from convincing in Turkey, let alone in the EU, given that civilisation gains its hegemonic meaning in direct association with being Western, as we shall see in the very words of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo¤an later in the chapter. For example, Andrew Davison (1995) has concluded his article on Gökalp praising his conceptual frame of culture/civilisation for offering a better alternative for the future of humanity. According to him, a ‘different’ culture can be accommodated within the same civilisation, read Western civilisation. I have demonstrated the imperfections of the BBC in its encounters with the Turkish audience in Chapter Four. Scannell and Cardiff point to how in the dayto-day output of the BBC in its formative years, ‘the issues of national identity and culture posed problems, which, on the one hand, arose from divisions within the supposed unity of British life and culture and, on the other, from the impact of foreign cultures and their perceived threat to traditional national values’ (1995: 324). In Hilmes’s words, ‘a need to contain and moderate sites of social tension establishing a hierarchy that promises to hold chaotic forces of difference and instability’ (1997: 23) in radio broadcasting is bound with conflicts. However, to the extent that these conflicts do not surface, the fantasy of true communication can be functional in defining the truth. Bernard Lewis has posited in a highly militaristic language yet another choice that Turkey has to make between inward and outward modernisation: ‘Outward modernization means accepting the devices, the amenities, the conveniences provided by Western science and industry while rejecting what are seen as pernicious Western values … outward modernization means buying and firing a gun. Inward modernization means learning to manufacture and ultimately design one’ (1997: 46). Nurettin Artam wrote in Radyo that the British had mastered the art of speaking to the microphone: ‘In England approximately twenty-eight different kinds of speaking English exist. Now a twenty-ninth has been added to this: Speaking on radio.’ Radyo, vol.2, no.16, 15 March 1943. The tips for presenters on radio, in a section called ‘A to Z of Presentation’ in a recent book on radio broadcasting, make this point clear. For example: ‘K: Do not forget to have a positive attitude to communicating on the radio. You have to enjoy talking to people and listening to people. You must be interested in what you are talking about, or people will switch off ... P: Why do people listen to voices on the radio? What are they hoping for? What do they appreciate? And how do they listen? You need to understand that listening is an individual experience’ (Crook 1998: 114-5).

236

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

10 Many Western essays on communication assume that true communication is possible. Just to give some examples: Karl Deutsch has argued that ‘processes of communication’ constitute the ‘basis of the coherence of societies’ (1966). A more recent example is of course Anderson’s thesis that communication is the material basis of national imagination. Giddens has posited that ‘the extension of communication cannot occur without the “conceptual” involvement of the whole community as a knowledgeable citizenry’ (1985: 219). Yet, he does not attend to the fantasy of the concept of communication. Habermas seeks the sources of true rationality in a ‘non-distorted’ communication (1984). 11 I have discussed elsewhere the intricacies of the resulting power regime with regard to this doubt (Ah›ska 1998). 12 The fervent nationalist demonstrations in several cities in Turkey just before the elections in 2007 seemingly opposed the AKP and regressive political Islam, but I find it very significant that the nationalist demonstrations made formal references through their slogans and props to the hotly debated funeral of Hrant Dink a few months earlier. The unexpected crowd at the funeral, the slogans that were shouted (‘We are all Armenians,’ ‘We are all Hrant Dink’), and the Hrant Dink masks that people wore to support the slogans had a shocking impact in a society within which Armenian identity has been cast and marginalised as Other, and in most cases associated with enmity against the Turkish nation. The nationalist demonstrations tried to counter the Hrant Dink funeral, by appropriating the same forms with a different content; hence, there were Atatürk masks and slogans such as ‘We are all Atatürks.’ Nationalism has become a venue through which repressed history is acted out (Ah›ska 2007, 2008). See Özyürek (2006) for a comprehensive analysis of how Atatürksim and the republican ideology and imagery are privatised in contemporary Turkey. 13 Despite cultural rights having been granted to Kurdish citizens as part of the negotiations with the EU, the rights of citizens to speak and publish in their own language have not been fully acknowledged by the state. Furthermore, harsh police surveillance over Kurdish areas and people continues, while Kurdish identity has also become a hated target of popular nationalist discourses and practices. 14 The ‘headscarf question’ has resurfaced in Turkey and become an object of fierce oppositions and debates, dividing various segments of society, even feminists among themselves, particularly on the issue of whether to allow veiled women to enter universities. 15 In our research on contemporary nationalism, based on more than 90 interviews and focus groups held in different parts of Turkey, we have discussed how the threats of the globalised economic and social regime provoke various nationalisms that feed different tactics of survival and that divide instead of unite people (Kentel, Ah›ska and Genç 2007). 16 See ‹smail Küçükkaya (2008). 17 Umut Özk›r›ml› has argued that ‘[r]eciprocal fears constitute the main problem in the relations between Turkey and the EU’ (2008: 57). The fears regarding Turkey’s possible membership in the EU can be grouped under three titles, according to Özk›r›ml›: migration, identity and security. Turkey’s fears, on the other hand, are primarily about loss of sovereignty. 18 Vatan, 25 January 2008.

NOTES

237

19 Sanjay Seth has discussed how students in colonial Bengal in the nineteenth century, exposed to Western education, had to learn what the ‘right’ answer was although it may not have been the ‘true’ one (2007: 668). 20 Yael Navaro-Yashin in her book on contemporary secularism and public life in Turkey has argued in a different vein, but with a similar concern, that ‘“cynicism” decribes the public experience of the political in contemporary Turkey’ (2002: 159). According to her, cynicism as habitus upholds the power regime and more particularly reinstates the state over and over again. 21 ‘Radyo Anketi,’ Yeni Adam, no.321, 20 February 1941, p.12. 22 Ibid. 23 Radyo, vol.2, no.17, 15 April 1943, p.19.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

I. Archives and Primary Sources a) BBC Written Archives, Reading, UK Files: E1/259/1; E1/1256; E1/1257; E1/1258; E1/1259/1; E1/1259/2; E1/1259/3; E1/1260; E1/2,430/1; E1/2,432/2; E2/425; E9/37; E12/973/1; E12/974/1; E14/34; E15/203; R13/204; R34/904. b) Public Record Office, Surrey, UK Files: FO371/10865; FO371/12333; FO371/25173 c) Ankara Radio Sound Archives, Ankara, Turkey ‘Türkiye Radyolar›nda Yar›m Yüzy›l,’ Yücel Ertugay, TRT Programme, 1975 (No: MER-B-324, MER-B-360, MER-B-706, MER-B-358, MER-B-357, MER-B353, MER-B-48, MER-B-741975). ‘Radyo An›lar›,’ Elçin Temel, TRT Radio Programme (no date and record number). ‘Günün ‹çinden,’ Sezi Ergun, Zehra Kurttekin, 1987 (no record number). d) Sound Records Found in the storeroom of Ankara Radio, including records of various radio dramas, talks, entertainment and music programmes, some without date, some produced between 1949 and 1955. The ones I used for analysis are: Mücadele Etmeli, radio drama written by Mükerrem Kamil Su, recorded in 1949. Vadiye Dönüfl, radio drama written by Kemal Sönmez, directed by O¤uz Bora, sound effects by Tahsin Temren, recorded in 1951. e) Interviews Abdullah Y›lmaz, 26 June 1996. Started to work in Ankara Radio in 1973 as a producer of ‘village programmes’; had to leave because of political reasons after 1980. Andrew Mango, 8 December 1995. Started to work in the BBC in 1947; became the Director of the Turkish Service in 1959; worked as the Director of the BBC South European Department until 1986. Ertu¤rul ‹mer, 25 January 1996. Worked in Ankara Radio as a sound engineer from 1954 until 1982.

240

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Faruk Yener, 24 July 1996. Started working in Istanbul Radio as the Director of the Discotheque in 1949; became the Director of Programmes in 1950; from the late 1960s onwards producer of classical music programmes. Handan Uran, 16 November 1996. An actress, she took part in several radio dramas including Kimgil Ailesi in the 1940s. Mahmut Tali Öngören, 24 January 1996. Became the Director of Ankara Radio in 1957; started working for TRT Television in 1968. Serpil Erdemgil, 21 June 1996. Started working in Ankara Radio in 1962; became the Director of Verbal Programmes in 1968; was employed by the BBC Turkish Service in 1971; became the Director of the BBC Turkish Service in 1996. Turgut Özakman, 25 January 1996. Started working in the General Directorate of Press and Publications in 1957; worked in Ankara Radio in different executive posts from 1961 to 1970; also a playwright and a novelist. Turhan Erdemgil, 30 July 1996. Employed by Ankara Radio both as presenter and producer in 1965; worked in TRT Foreign Broadcasts from 1972 to 1980; then worked in the BBC Turkish Service until 1994. f) Newspapers and Journals Ay›n Tarihi (1926-40) Cumhuriyet (1926-50) Kadro (1923-33) La Quinzaine d’Ankara (A radio journal in French published by the Turkish General Directorate of Press and Publications, 1947-48) Müzik ve Sanat Hareketleri (1934-35) Olufl (1939) Radyo (1941-49) Radyo Alemi (1934-53) Radyo ve Sahne (1951) Telsiz (1927) Ülkü (1932-37) Vakit (1927-30) Yeni Adam (1934-50) Yeni Ses (1939) g) Books and Manuscripts Arc›man, Muhip (1948). Radyoda Kimlerle Baflbaflay›z?, Ankara. Ataç, Galip (1943). Radyoda Evin Saati, Istanbul: Kenan Matbaas›. Baltac›o¤lu, ‹smay›l Hakk› (1939). ‹nanmak, Istanbul: Sebat Bas›mevi. Belge, Burhan (1970). Burhan Belge’nin Sesiyle ‹kinci Dünya Savafl›, Ankara: Baflnur Matbaas›.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

241

Duru, Kâz›m Nami (1937). Ankara Radyosu’nda Söylediklerim, Ankara: Ulus Bas›mevi. Dünden Bügüne Radyo-Televizyon, 1927-1990 (1990), TRT Yay›nlar›. Ebcio¤lu, Hikmet Münir (1963). Mikrofon, Ankara: Ayy›ld›z Matbaas›. Eraslan, Zafer Nuri (1979). Radyo Oyunlar› Üzerine Bir Araflt›rma, TRT Araflt›rma ‹nceleme Dizisi: I. Ertu¤, Celal (1945). Radyoda Pazar Sohbetleri, Ankara: Akay. Ertu¤, Hasan Refik (1951). Radyo ‹flletmecili¤i ve Meseleleri, Istanbul: I.Ü. ‹ktisat Fakültesi Gazetecilik Enstitüsü. Gilliam, Laurence (1945). ‘The Radio Documentary in Wartime,’ in BBC Yearbook. Halkevinden Halka (1945), Ankara: Ankara Halkevi. Halkevleri 1932-1935: 103 Halkevi Geçen Y›llarda Nas›l Çal›flt›, CHP. ‹nan, Afet (1964). Taymis’ten Üsküdara/From the Thames to Scutari, trans. E. Uzmen, Ankara, Tarih Kurumu Bas›mevi. Istanbul Radyosu (1949), Istanbul Radyosu Müdürlü¤ü. Kamay, Behçet (1941). Radyo Konferanslar›: Sa¤l›k ve Sosyal Bahisler, Ankara: Yeni Cezaevi Matbaas›. Kozano¤lu, Cevdet (no date). Radyo Hat›ralar›m, ed. Nazmi Özalp, no place of publication. Kuyucak, Hazim At›f (1943). Radyo ‹ktisat Saati Konuflmalar›, Ankara. Özakman, Turgut (1969). Radyo Notlar›, TRT Bas›l› Yay›nlar› Müdürlü¤ü. Radyo Çocuk Piyesleri (1952), Ankara: Radyo Çocuk Saati Bürosu. Radyo Oyun Yazarlar› ‹çin Bilgiler (1971), TRT Bas›l› Yay›nlar Müdürlü¤ü. fiemsi (1927). Gençlere Telsiz Telefon Hocas›, Istanbul. fienocak, Cemil (no date). Radyo Sohbetleri, Tar›m Bakanl›¤›. Tarcan, Selim S›rr› (1932). Radyo Konferanslar›m, Istanbul: Devlet Matbaas›. Tör, Vedat Nedim (1966). Bofl Zamanlar› De¤erlendirmede Telkin Vas›talar›n›n Rolleri, Istanbul: Akgün Matbaas›. — (1976). Y›llar Böyle Geçti, Istanbul: Milliyet Yay›nlar›. Tülbentçi, Feridun Faz›l (1945). Geçmiflte Bugün, Istanbul: Cumhuriyet Matbaas›. Utkular, ‹smail (1950). Radyo Evleri, Istanbul: ‹stanbul Teknik Üniversitesi. Vâ-nû, Vâlâ Nurettin (1944). ‘Bir Türk fiehrinde ‹mar Coflkunlu¤u,’ ‘Turunçgiller Ailesi,’ in Antalya ‹kinci Dünya Harbinde Nas›l Güzelleflebildi? Istanbul: Kenan Matbaas›. White, Antonia (no date). BBC at War, no place of publication. Yorulmaz, Cemal (1945). ‘Bizde ve Öteki Memleketlerde Radyo’ (unpublished manuscript). II. Secondary Bibliography Abal›o¤lu, Yunus Nadi (1955). Ankara’n›n ‹lk Günleri, Istanbul: Sel Yay›nlar›. Abu-Lughod, Lila (ed) (1998). Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Adas, Michael (1989). Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ad›var, Halide Edip (1934). Turkey Faces West: A Turkish View of Recent Changes and their Origins, New Haven: Yale University Press. — (1935). Conflict of East and West in Turkey, Lahore: Shaikh Muhammed Ashraf.

242

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

— (1994). Türkün Ateflle ‹mhtihan›, Istanbul: Atlas Kitabevi [published in English as The Turkish Ordeal, London, 1928]. Adorno, Theodor W. (1981). Prisms, Cambridge: The MIT Press. — (2003). The Jargon of Authenticity, London: Routledge. Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, London: Verso. Ah›ska, Meltem (1996). ‘Kimlik Kavram› Üzerine Fragmanlar,’ Defter 27: 9-35. — (1998). ‘Türkiye’de ‹ktidar ve Gerçeklik,’ Defter 33: 19-40. — (2003). ‘Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern,’ Relocating the Fault Lines: Turkey beyond the East-West Divide, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 102.2/3: 351-79. — (2006). ‘Occidentalism and Registers of Truth: Politics of Archives in Turkey,’ Special Issue on Social Memory, eds. Meltem Ah›ska, Biray K›rl›, New Perspectives on Turkey 34: 9-29. — (2007). ‘A Deep Fissure is Revealed after Hrant Dink’s Assassination,’ New Perspectives on Turkey 36: 155-64. — (2008). ‘Orientalism/Occidentalism: The Impasse of Modernity,’ in Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said, eds. M.G. Sökmen, B. Ertür, London: Verso. Ahmat, Aijaz (1992). In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso. Ahmad, Feroz (1969). The Young Turks, London: Oxford University Press. — (1993). The Making of Modern Turkey, London: Routledge. Akçam, Taner (2004). From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, London: Zed Books. Ak›, Niyazi (1968). Ça¤dafl Türk Tiyatrosuna Toplu Bak›fl, 1923-1967, Ankara: Atatürk Üniversitesi Yay›nlar›. Aksoy, Bülent (1985). ‘Tanzimattan Cumhuriyete Musiki ve Bat›l›laflma,’ in Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Türkiye Ansiklopedisi, vol.5, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Akflit, Elif Ekin (2005). K›zlar›n Sessizli¤i: K›z Enstitülerinin Uzun Tarihi, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Aktar, Cengiz (1993). Türkiye’nin Bat›l›laflt›r›lmas›, Istanbul: Ayr›nt›. Aktar, Ayhan (2000). Varl›k Vergisi ve ‘Türklefltirme Politikalar›’, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (2006). Türk Milliyetçili¤i, Gayrimüslimler ve Ekonomik Dönüflüm, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. al’Azm, Sad›k Jalal (1981). ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,’ Khamsin 8: 526. Alemdar, Korkmaz (1996). ‹letiflim ve Tarih, Ankara: ‹mge. Ali, Filiz (1983). ‘Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nde Konservatuvarlar,’ in Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türkiye Ansiklopedisi, vol.6, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Alp, Tekin (1935). Kemalizm, Istanbul: Cumhuriyet Gazetesi ve Matbaas›. Alt›nay, Ayfle Gül (2004). The Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Amin, Samir (1989). Eurocentrism, London: Zed Books. And, Metin (1983). Türk Tiyatrosu, Ankara: T.‹.B. Kültür Yay›nlar›. Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. — (1996). ‘Introduction,’ in Mapping the Nation, ed. G. Balakrishan, London: Verso. — (1998). The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World, London: Routledge.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

243

Ang, Ien (1985). Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, London: Methuen. — (1996). Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, London: Routledge. Arat, Zehra (1994). ‘Turkish Women and the Republican Reconstruction of Tradition,’ in Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity, and Power, eds. F.M. Göçek, S. Balaghi, New York: Columbia University Press. Araz, Nezihe (1996). Mustafa Kemal’in Ankaras›, Istanbul: Dünya. Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Arl›, Alim (2004). Oryantalizm-Oksidentalizm ve fierif Mardin, Istanbul: Küre. Armstrong, John (1982). Nations before Nationalism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Arnheim, Rudolf (1993). ‘In Praise of Blindness,’ in Radiotext(e), ed. N. Strauss, Semiotext(e) 6/16. Asad, Talal (1986). ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,’ in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. J. Clifford, G.E. Marcus, Berkeley: University of California Press. Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (1959). Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, II, Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu. Atay, Falih R›fk› (1969). Çankaya, Istanbul: Do¤an Kardefl Bas›mevi. Atefl, Toktam›fl (1981). Kemalizmin Özü, Istanbul: Der. Attali, Jacques (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Theory and History of Literature, vol.16, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Attridge, David; Bennington Geoff; Young, Robert (eds) (1987). Post-structuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ayd›n, Cemil (2006). ‘Between Occidentalism and the Global Left: Islamist Critiques of the West in Turkey,’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26/3: 446- 461. Ayd›n, Suavi (1993). Modernleflme ve Milliyetçilik, Ankara: Gündo¤an. Aykut, fieref (1936). Kamâlizm, Istanbul: Muallim A. Halit K. Aziz, Aysel (2002). Radyo Yay›nc›l›¤›, Ankara: Nobel. Bachelard, Gaston (1993). ‘Reverie and Radio,’ in Radiotext(e), ed. N. Strauss, Semiotext(e) 6/16. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1968). Rabelais and His World, Cambridge: The MIT Press. — (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press. — (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. C. Emerson, M. Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. Balakrishnan, Gopal (ed) (1996). Mapping the Nation, London: Verso. Balibar, Etienne (1991). ‘Class Racism,’ in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Etienne Balibar, Immanuel Wallerstein, London: Verso. Barfield, Ray (1996). Listening to Radio: 1920-1950, Westport: Praeger. Barlas, ‹hsan (1987). ‘Ajans’tan Hat›ralar,’ Tarih ve Toplum 7/39: 51-55. Barry, Andrew (1996). ‘Lines of Communication and Spaces of Rule,’ in Foucault and Political Reason, eds. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, Nikolas Rose, London: UCL Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1989a). Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press. — (1989b). Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals, Cambridge: Polity Press.

244

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

— (2000). Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bayrak, Mehmet (1991). ‘Tarihsel Geliflimi ‹çinde Kürt Kültürü ve Asimilasyon (Temsil) Politikas›,’ in Kürt Halk Türküleri, Istanbul: Öz-Ge. Bayraktaro¤lu, Arin (2007). Culture Shock!: Turkey, Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish Corp. Baysal, Jale (ed) (1984). Günümüzde Arfliv Yönetimi: Meslek E¤itiminin Temelleri, Istanbul: ‹stanbul Üniversitesi. Beer, Gillian (1996). ‘“Wireless”: Popular Physics, Radio and Modernism,’ in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, eds. F. Spufford, J. Uglow, London: Faber and Faber. Bell, Vikki (1999). ‘Mimesis as Cultural Survival,’ in Performativity and Belonging, ed. V. Bell, London: Sage. Benjamin, Walter (1968). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books. Bennington, Geoffrey (1994). Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction, London: Verso. Berkes, Niyazi (1964). The Development of Secularism in Turkey, Montreal: McGill University Press. — (1973). Türkiye’de Ça¤dafllaflma, Ankara: Bilgi. Berland, Jody (1993). ‘Contradicting Media: Toward a Political Phenomenology of Listening,’ in Radiotext(e), ed. N. Strauss, Semiotext(e) 6/16. — (1994). ‘Toward a Creative Anachronism: Radio, the State and Sound Government,’ in Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission, eds. D. Augaitis, D. Lander, Alberta: Walter Phillips Gallery. Bhabha, Homi K. (1990). ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,’ in Nation and Narration, ed. H. K. Bhabha, London: Routledge. — (1991). ‘A Question of Survival,’ in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, ed. James Donald, London: Macmillan. — (1993). ‘Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,’ in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. P. Williams, L. Chrisman, New York: Columbia University Press. — (1994). The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bisbee, Eleanor (1951). The New Turks: Pioneers of the Republic, 1920-1950, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1997). ‘Translating,’ in Friendship, Palo Alto: Stanford Uni. Press. Blumler, Jay G.; Katz, Elihu (1974). The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research, Beverly Hills: Sage. Bora, Tan›l (1995). Milliyetçili¤in Kara Bahar›, Istanbul: Birikim Yay›nlar›. — (1996). ‘‹nfla Döneminde Türk Kimli¤i,’ Toplum ve Bilim 71: 168-94. — (1999). Türk Sa¤›n›n Üç Hali, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (2003). ‘Nationalist Discourses in Turkey,’ in Relocating the Fault Lines: Turkey beyond the East-West Divide, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 102:2/3: 433-51. Boroujerdi, Mehrzad (1996). Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism, New York: Syracuse University Press. Boym, Svetlana (2001). The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books. Bowen, Harold (1945). British Contributions to Turkish Studies, London: British Council, Longmans Green & Co. Bowie, Malcolm (1991). Lacan, London: Fontana Press. Bozdo¤an, Sibel (2001). Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

245

in the Early Republic, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Bozdo¤an, Sibel; Kasaba, Reflat (1997). ‘Introduction,’ in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds. S. Bozdo¤an, R. Kasaba, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Breuilly, John (1985). ‘Reflections on Nationalism,’ in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 15: 65-75. Briggs, Asa (1961). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume I, The Birth of Broadcasting, London: Oxford University Press. — (1965). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II, The Golden Age of Wireless, London: Oxford University Press. — (1970). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume III, The War of Words, London: Oxford University Press. — (1979). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume IV, Sound and Vision, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Browne, Donald R. (1989). Comparing Broadcast Systems: The Experiences of Six Industrialized Nations, Ames: Iowa State University Press. Buruma, Ian; Margalit, Avishai (2004). Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, New York: Penguin Press. Butler, Judith (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press. — (2004). ‘Judith Butler: Reanimating the Social,’ in The Future of Social Theory, ed. N. Gane, London: Continuum. — (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Cain, John (1992). The BBC: 70 Years of Broadcasting, London: BBC. Cankaya, Özden (2003). TRT: Bir Kitle ‹letiflim Kurumunun Tarihi: 1927-2000, Istanbul: YKY. Cantek, Funda fienol (2003). ‘Yaban’lar ve Yerliler: Baflkent Olma Sürecinde Ankara, Ankara: ‹letiflim. — (ed) (2006). Sanki Viran Ankara, Ankara: ‹letiflim. Carey, James (1992). Communication as Culture, New York: Routledge. Carrier, James G. (1995). ‘Introduction,’ in Occidentalism: Images of the West, ed. J. G. Carrier, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Certau, Michel de (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chambers, Ian (1993). ‘Narratives of Nationalism: Being “British,”’ in Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, eds. E. Carter, J. Donald, J. Squires, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Chatterjee, Partha (1992). ‘Their Own Words? An Essay for Edward Said,’ in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. M. Sprinker, Cambridge, Oxford: Blackwell. — (1993a). Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, London: Zed Books. — (1993b). The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (2004). The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press. Cheah, Pheng (1999). ‘Spectral Nationality: The Living On [sur-vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization,’ boundary 2 26/3: 225-52.

246

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

— (2003). Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, New York: Columbia University Press. Chen, Xiomei (1995). Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post Mao China, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clifford, James (1988). ‘On Orientalism,’ in The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCentury Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Coronil, Fernando (1996). ‘Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories,’ Cultural Anthropology 11/1: 52-87. Cory, Mark E. (1992). ‘Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art,’ in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde, eds. D. Kahn, G. Whitehead, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crisell, Andrew (1994). Understanding Radio, London: Routledge. Crook, Tim (1998). International Radio Journalism: History, Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. Curran, James (1990). ‘“The New Revisionism” in Mass Communications Research,’ European Journal of Communication 5.2/3: 135-64. Çak›r, Serpil (1994). Osmanl› Kad›n Hareketi, Istanbul: Metis. Çelik, Zeynep (1993). The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press. Davin, Anna (1997). ‘Imperialism and Motherhood,’ in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds. F. Cooper, A. L. Stoler, Berkeley: University of California Press. Davison, Andrew (1995). ‘Secularization and Modernization in Turkey: The Ideas of Ziya Gökalp,’ Economy and Society 24/2: 189-224. Davison, Roderick H. (1990). Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774-1923: The Impact of the West, London: Saqi Books. Deleuze, Gilles (1988). Foucault, London: Atlone Press. Demirel, Ahmet (1994). Birinci Meclis’te Muhalefet: ‹kinci Grup, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Deringil, Selim (1999). The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909, London: I. B. Tauris. — (2004). Turkish Foreign Policy during the Second World War: An 'Active' Neutrality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1978). Writing and Difference, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. — (1992). The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. — (1996). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Deutsch, Karl (1966). Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Devran, Yusuf (1993). ‘Radyo ve Televizyonun Türk Siyasi Hayat›ndaki Yeri, 19271992,’ Gazi University: unpublished MA thesis. Dolar, Mladen (1998). ‘The Subject Supposed to Enjoy,’ in The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, Alain Grosrichard, London: Verso. Donald, James (1991). ‘On the Threshold: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies,’ in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, ed. J. Donald, London: Macmillan, ICA. — (1992). Sentimental Education, London: Verso. Donald, James; Rattansi, Ali (1992). ‘Introduction,’ in ‘Race’, Culture and Difference,

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

247

eds. J. Donald, A. Rattansi, London: Sage. Dreyfus, Hubert L.; Rabinow, Paul (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Duben, Alan; Behar, Cem (1991). Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880-1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dumont, Paul (1984). ‘The Origins of Kemalist Ideology,’ in Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. J.M. Landau, Leiden: E.J. Brill. Durakbafla, Ayfle; ‹lyaso¤lu, Aynur (2001). ‘Formation of Gender Identities in Republican Turkey, and Women’s Narratives as Transmitters of “Herstory” of Modernization,’ Journal of Social History 35/1: 195-203. Dyson, Frances (1994). ‘The Genealogy of the Radio Voice,’ in Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission, eds. D. Augaitis, D. Lander, Alberta, Walter Phillips Gallery. Eagleton, Terry (1981). Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, London: NLB. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1981). ‘The Kemalist Revolution in Comparative Perspective,’ in Atatürk: Founder of a Modern State, eds. A. Kazanc›gil, E. Özbudun, London: C. Hurst & Company. Elliott, Anthony (1992). Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva, Oxford: Blackwell. Enloe, Cynthia (1989). Bananas, Beaches, Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, London: Pandora. Enver Pafla (1989). Kendi Mektuplar›nda Enver Pafla, Istanbul: Der. Erdamar, Bengül (1992). Radyo Programc›l›¤›, Istanbul: Der. Eren, Nuri (1963). Turkey Today and Tomorrow: An Experiment in Westernization, Dunmow: Pall Mall Press. Erikan, Celal (1974). Atatürkçülük-Kemalizm, Ankara: Türkiye ‹fl Bankas› Kültür Yay›nlar›. Eronat, Canan Yücel (ed) (1996). Yakup Kadri’den Hasan Ali Yücel’e Mektuplar, Istanbul: Yap› Kredi. Ersanl›-Behar, Büflra (1992). ‹ktidar ve Tarih: Türkiye’de ‘Resmi Tarih’ Tezinin Oluflumu, 1929-1937, Istanbul: Afa. Ertu¤rul, Muhsin (1989). Benden Sonra Tufan Olmas›n: An›lar, Istanbul: Ezac›bafl› Vakf› Yay›nlar›. Esslin, Martin (1980). Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett and the Media, London: Eyre-Methuen. Ettema, James S.; Whitney, Charles D. (eds) (1994). Audiencemaking: How the Media Create the Audience, London: Sage. Fanon, Frantz (1963). The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin. — (1970). ‘This is the Voice of Algeria,’ in A Dying Colonialism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. — (1993). Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press. Fiske, John (1987). Television Culture, London: Methuen. — (1991). ‘Postmodernism and Television,’ in Mass Media and Society, ed. J. Curran, M. Gurevitch, London: Routledge. — (1993). Power Plays/Power Works, London: Verso. Forgacs, David (1982). ‘Marxist Literary Theories,’ in Modern Literary Theory, eds. A. Jefferson, D. Robey, London: Batsford.

248

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Forrester, John (1990). The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel (1977). Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — (1982). ‘The Subject and Power,’ in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. H.L. Dreyfus, P. Rabinow, London: Harvaster Wheatsheaf. — (1988). Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, New York: Routledge. — (1986). The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, Harmondsworth: Penguin. — (1991a). ‘Politics and the Study of Discourse,’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, P. Miller, Hertfordshire, Harvaster Wheatsheaf. — (1991b). ‘Questions of Method,’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, P. Miller, Hertfordshire: Harvaster Wheatsheaf. — (1991c). ‘Governmentality,’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, P. Miller, Hertfordshire: Harvaster Wheatsheaf. — (2002). The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Routledge Classics. Fox, Richard G. (1992). ‘East of Said,’ in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. M. Sprinker, Oxford: Blackwell. Freud, Sigmund (1959). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1989). Truth and Method, London: Sheed &Ward. Gay, Peter (1985). Freud for Historians, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geertz, Clifford (1993). The Interpretation of Cultures, London: Fontana Press. Gellner, Ernest (1964). Thought and Change, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. — (1983). Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. — (1994). Encounters with Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Georgeon, François (1986). Türk Milliyetçili¤inin Kökenleri: Yusuf Akçura, 1876-1935, Ankara: Yurt. Giddens, Anthony (1985). The Nation-State and Violence, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Gledhill, John (1994). Power and its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics, London: Pluto Press. Godfried, Nathan (1997). WCFL: Chicago’s Voice of Labor, 1926-78, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Goffman, Erving (1980). ‘The Radio Drama Frame,’ in Communication Studies, eds. J. Corner, J. Hawthorn, London: Edward Arnold. Gordon, Colin (1991). ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, P. Miller, Hetfordshire: Harvaster Wheatsheaf. Göçek, Fatma Müge (1996). Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Göçek, Fatma Müge; Balaghi, Shiva (eds) (1994). Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity, and Power, New York: Columbia University Press. Gökalp, Ziya (1917a). ‘‹çtimaiyat ve Fikriyat: Cemiyette Büyük Adamlar›n Tesiri,’ in ‹çtimaiyat Mecmuas› I/2 [for the abridged version as ‘Manifestations of the National Ethos’ see Gökalp 1981: 156-71].

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

249

— (1917b). ‘Millet Nedir?’ in ‹çtimaiyat Mecmuas› I/3 [for the abridged version as ‘The Rise of Nations’ see Gökalp 1981: 125-34]. — (1981). Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp, trans. and ed. N. Berkes, Westport: Greenwood Publishers. — (1990). Türkçülü¤ün Esaslar›, Istanbul: M.E.B. Yay›nlar›. — (1994). Türkçülü¤ün Esaslar›, eds. M. Ünlü, Y. Çotuksöken, Istanbul: ‹nkilâp. Gökar›ksel, Banu, Mitchell, Katharyne (2005). ‘Veiling, Secularism, and the Neoliberal Subject: National Narratives and Supranational Desires in Turkey and France,’ in Global Networks 5/2: 147-65. Gökay, Bülent (1996). ‘Turkish Settlement and the Caucasus, 1918-20,’ in Turkey: Identity, Democracy, Politics, ed. S. Kedourie, London: Frank Cass. — (2005). ‘The Kurdish Question in Turkey: Historical Roots, Domestic Concerns and International Law,’ in Minorities, Peoples and Self-Determination, eds. N. Ghanea, A. Xanthaki, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Göle, Nilüfer (1997a). The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. — (1997b). ‘The Quest for the Islamic Self within the Context of Modernity,’ in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds. S. Bozdo¤an, R. Kasaba, Seattle: University of Washington Press. — (2000a). ‘Global Expectations, Local Experiences: Non-Western Modernities,’ in Through a Glass, Darkly, ed. W. Arts, Leiden: E. J. Brill. — (2000b). ‘Snaphots of Islamic Modernities,’ Deadalus, thematic issue on Multiple Modernities, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, 129/1: 91-118. Graham-Brown, Sarah (1988). Images of Women, London: Quartet Books. Gray, Frances (1981). ‘The Nature of Radio Drama,’ in Radio Drama, ed. P. Lewis, London: Longman. Greenfeld, Liah (1992). Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Grosrichard, Alain (1998). The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, London: Verso. Grossberg, Lawrence (1996). ‘Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There is?’ in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. S. Hall, P. du Gay, London: Sage. — (2000). ‘History, Imagination and the Politics of Belonging : Between the Death and the Fear of History,’ in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, eds. P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg, A. McRobbie, London: Verso. Gurevitch, Michael (1993). ‘The Globalization of Electronic Journalism,’ in Mass Media and Society, eds. J. Curran, M. Gurevitch, London: Edward Arnold. Gülalp, Haldun (1997). ‘Modernization Policies and Islamicist Politics in Turkey,’ in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds. S. Bozdo¤an, R. Kasaba, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Gülizar, Jülide (1994). Haberler Bitti, fiimdi Oyun Havalar›, Ankara: Ümit. — (1995). TRT Meydan Savafl›, Ankara: Ümit. Gürbilek, Nurdan (1992). Vitrinde Yaflamak, Istanbul: Metis. — (1995). Yer De¤ifltiren Gölge, Istanbul: Metis. — (1999). Ev Ödevi, Istanbul: Metis. — (2001). Kötü Çocuk Türk, Istanbul: Metis. — (2004). Kör Ayna, Kay›p fiark: Edebiyat ve Endifle, Istanbul: Metis. Habermas, Jürgen (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1, Reason and

250

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Rationalization of Society, Boston: Beacon Press. Hall, Stuart (1980). ‘Encoding/Decoding,’ in Culture, Media, Language, eds. S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, P. Willis, London: Hutchinson. — (1991). ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,’ in Culture, Globalization and the World-System, ed. A. King, London: Macmillan. — (1996). ‘When was the “Post Colonial”? Thinking at the Limit,’ in Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, eds. I. Chambers, L. Curti, London: Routledge. Halman, Talat Sait (1976). Modern Turkish Drama: An Anthology of Plays in Translation, Minneapolis : Bibliotheca Islamica. Harootunian, Harry (2000). Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harvey, David (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Cambridge: Blackwell. Hasgül, Necdet (1996). ‘Cumhuriyet Dönemi Müzik Politikalar›,’ in Folklora Do¤ru, BÜFK 62. Hay, D. (1968). Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1967). What is a Thing?, South Bend, Indiana: Regnery/Gateway. Hengry, Paget; Buhle, Paul (1992). C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, Durham: Duke University Press. Heper, Metin; Öncü, Ayfle; Kramer, Heinz (eds) (1993). Turkey and the West: Changing Political and Cultural Identities, London: I. B. Tauris. Herf, Jeffrey (1984). Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzfeld, Michael (1991). The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureacracy, New York: Berg. — (1995). ‘Hellenism and Occidentalism: The Permutations of Performance in Greek Bourgeois Identity,’ in Occidentalism: Images of the West, ed. J. G. Carrier, Oxford: Clarendon Press. — (1997). Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State, London: Routledge. — (2002). ‘The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism,’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 101/4: 899-926. Herzog, M. H. (1987). ‘Decoding Dallas: Comparing American and German Viewers,’ in Television in Society, eds. A. A. Berger, New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Hetherington, Kevin (1997). The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, London: Routledge. Heyd, Uriel (1950). Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp, London: Harvill Press. — (1954). Language Reform in Modern Turkey, Jerusalem: Israel Oriental Society. Hilliard, Robert L.: Keith, Michael C. (1997). The Broadcast Century: A Biography of American Broadcasting, Boston: Focal Press. Hilmes, Michele (1997). Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hirschon, Renée (ed) (2003). Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey, New York: Berghahn Books.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

251

Hirschkind, Charles (2004). ‘Hearing Modernity: Eygpt, Islam and the Pious Ear,’ in Hearing Cultures: Sound, Listening and Modernity, New York: Berg Publishers. Hirschkop, Ken; Shepherd, David (eds) (1989). Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1990). Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J.; Ranger, Terence (eds) (1983). The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodge, Robert; Kress, Gunther (1988). Social Semiotics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W. (1993). Dialectics of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum. Huyssen, Andreas (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, London: Macmillan Press. — (1995). Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York: Routledge. Ignacio, José; Vigil, Lopez (1995). Rebel Radio: The Story of El Salvador’s Radio Venceromos, London: Latin American Bureau. ‹nalc›k, Halil (2002). ‘Hermenötik, Oryantalizm, Türkoloji,’ in Do¤u Bat›, Oryantalizm-I, 20: 13-39. ‹nan, Afet (1977). Türkiye Cumhuriyeti ve Türk Devrimi, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yay›nlar›. Jameson, Fredric (1981). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Methuen. Jayawardena, Kumari (1986). Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, London: Zed Books. Johnson, Lesley (1988). The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio, London: Routledge. Jordanova, L. J. (1995). ‘Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexuality,’ in Nature, Culture and Gender, eds. C. MacCormack, M. Strathern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jusdanis, Gregory (1991). Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, Theory and History of Literature, vol.81, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kad›o¤lu, Ayfle (1996). ‘The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity,’ in Turkey: Identity, Democracy, Politics, ed. S. Kedourie, London: Frank Cass. — (1999). Cumhuriyet ‹radesi, Demokrasi Muhakemesi: Türkiye’de Demokratik Aç›l›m Aray›fllar›, Istanbul: Metis. Kahn, Douglas, Whitehead, Gregory (eds) (1992). Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Kandiyoti, Deniz (1989). ‘Women and the Turkish State: Political Actors or Symbolic Pawns?,’ in Women-Nation-State, eds. N. Yuval-Davis, F. Anthias, London: Macmillan. — (1991). ‘End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism and Women in Turkey,’ in Women, Islam and the State, ed. D. Kandiyoti, London: Macmillan. — (1993). ‘Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation,’ in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. P. Williams, L. Chrisman, New York: Columbian University Press.

252

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

— (1996). ‘Contemporary Feminist Scholarship and Middle East Studies,’ in Gendering the Middle East, ed. D. Kandiyoti, London: I. B. Tauris. — (1997a). ‘Gendering the Modern: On Missing Dimensions in the Study of Turkish Modernity,’ in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds. S. Bozdo¤an, R. Kasaba, Seattle: University of Washington Press. — (1997b). Cariyeler, Bac›lar, Yurttafllar: Kimlikler ve Toplumsal Dönüflümler, Istanbul: Metis. — (1998). ‘Afterword: Some Awkard Questions on Women and Modernity in Turkey,’ in Remaking Women, ed. L. Abu-Lughod, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kaplan, Mehmet (1967). Nesillerin Ruhu, Istanbul: Hareket Yay›n›. Kara, Halim (2007). ‘The Literary Portrayal of Mehmed II in Turkish Historical Fiction,’ New Perspectives on Turkey 36: 71-95. Karal, Enver Ziya (1981). ‘The Principles of Kemalism,’ in Atatürk: The Founder of a Nation State, eds. A. Kazanc›gil, E. Özbudun, London, C. Hurst and Company. Karaosmano¤lu, Yakup Kadri (1971). Panorama, Vol. I, II, Istanbul: Remzi. — (1981). Atatürk, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (1983). Yaban, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (1994). Ankara, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Karpat, Kemal H. (1959). Turkey’s Politics: Transition to a Multi-Party System, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kasaba, Reflat (1997). ‘Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities,’ in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds. S. Bozdo¤an, R. Kasaba, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Katz, Sheila Hannah (1996). ‘Adam and Adama, ‘Ird and Ard: En-gendering Political Conflict and Identity in Early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalisms,’ in Gendering the Middle East, ed. D. Kandiyoti, London: I. B. Tauris. Kentel, Ferhat; Ah›ska, Meltem; Genç, F›rat (2007). ‘Milletin Bölünmez Bütünlü¤ü’: Demokratikleflme Sürecinde Parçalayan Milliyetçilik(ler), Istanbul: TESEV. Keyder, Ça¤lar (1987). State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development, London: Verso. — (1997). ‘Whither the Project of Modernity? Turkey in the 1990s,’ in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds. S. Bozdo¤an, R. Kasaba, Seattle: University of Washington Press. — (2003). Memalik’i Osmaniye’den Avrupa Birli¤i’ne, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Keyder, Ça¤lar; Frangoudaki, Anna (2007). Ways to Modernity in Greece and Turkey: Encounters with Europe, 1850-1950, London: I.B. Tauris. Keyman, Fuat (ed) (2007). Remaking Turkey: Globalization, Alternative Modernities, and Democray, Lanham: Lexington Books. Keyman, Fuat; ‹çduygu, Ahmet (ed) (2005). Citizenship in a Global World, European Questions and Turkish Experiences, London: Routledge. Kieser, Hans-Lukas (ed) (2006). Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-Nationalist Identities, London: I.B. Tauris. Kinross, Lord (1964). Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Kirby, Fay (1963). Türkiye’de Köy Enstitüleri, Ankara: ‹mece. Kocabaflo¤lu, Uygur (1980). fiirket Telsizinden Devlet Radyosuna, Ankara: A.Ü.S.B.F. Yay›nlar›.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

253

Koçak, Orhan (1995). ‘Ataç, Meriç, Caliban, Bandung/Evrensellik ve K›smilik Üzerine bir Taslak,’ in Türk Ayd›n› ve Kimlik Sorunu, ed. fi. fien, Istanbul: Ba¤lam. — (2001). ‘Kayg›l› Tarih: 1920’lerden 1970’lere Kültür Politikalar›,’ in Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düflünce: Kemalizm, vol.2, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Koslofsky, Craig (2002). ‘From Presence to Remembrance: The Transformation of Memory in the German Reformation,’ in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, eds. A. Confino, P. Fritzsche, Urbana, University of Illinois Press. Köker, Levent (1990). Modernleflme, Kemalizm ve Demokrasi, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Kristeva, Julia (1981). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. L. S. Roudiez, Oxford: Blackwell. — (1993). Nations without Nationalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Kritzman, Lawrence D. (1988). ‘Foucault and the Politics of Experience,’ in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. L. D. Kritzman, London: Routledge. Kruks, Sonia (1996). ‘Fanon, Sartre, and Identity Politics,’ in Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds. L.R. Gordon, T.D. Sharpley-Whiting, R.T. White, Oxford: Blackwell. Krüger, K. (1932). Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East, London: George Allen and Unwin. Kuran, Ercümend (1968). ‘The Impact of Nationalism on the Turkish Elite in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, eds. W. Polk, R.L. Chambers, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kushner, David (1977). The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, London: Frank Cass. — (1984). ‘Westernism in Contemporary Turkey,’ in Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. J. M. Landau, Leiden: E.J. Brill. Küçükkaya, Ismail (2008). Cumhuriyetimize Dair, Ankara: Aflina Kitaplar. Lacey, Katherine E.R. (1993). Bridging the Divide: Women, Radio and the Renegotiation of the Public and Private Spheres in Germany, 1923-1945, University of Liverpool: unpublished PhD Thesis. — (2000). ‘Towards a Periodization of Listening: Radio and Modern Life,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 3/2: 279-88. — (2006). ‘The Invention of a Listening Public: Radio and its Audiences,’ in Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth Century Germany, eds. C. Ross and K.C. Fuehrer, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Laclau, Ernesto (2005). On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1989). ‘The Echo of the Subject,’ in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. C. Fynsk, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Landau, Jacob M. (ed) (1984). Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, Leiden: E.J. Brill. Laplanche, J.; Pontalis, J.B. (1988). The Language of Psycho-Analysis, London: Karnac Books. Lasch, Christopher (1985). ‘Introduction,’ in The Ego-Ideal: Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the Ideal, J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, London: Free Association Books. Lazarsfeld, Paul F.; Berelson, Bernard; Guadet, Hazel (1948). The People’s Choice, New York: Columbia University Press. Lazarsfeld, Paul F.; Stanton, Frank N. (eds) (1944). Radio Research 1942-43, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.

254

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Lerner, Daniel (1958). The Passing of Traditional Society, Illinois: Free Press of Glencoe. Lewis, Bernard (1953). ‘The Impact of French Revolution on Turkey,’ Journal of World History 1/1: 105-26. — (1968). The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (1997). The Future of the Middle East, London: Phoenix. — (2004). From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Geoffrey L. (1984). ‘Atatürk’s Language Reform as an Aspect of Modernization in the Republic of Turkey,’ in Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. J. Landau, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Lewis, Peter (ed) (1981). Radio Drama, London: Longman. Lewis, Peter M; Booth, Jerry (1989). The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio, London: Macmillan. Llobera, Joseph R. (1994). The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe, Oxford, Providence: Berg Publishers. Lowenthal, David (1985). The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukács, Georg (1973). ‘Approximation to Life in the Novel and the Play,’ in Sociology of Literature and Drama, eds. E. and T. Burns, Harmondsworth: Penguin. MacKenzie, John M. (1986). ‘“In Touch with the Infinite”: The BBC and the Empire, 1923-53,’ in Imperialism and Popular Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mahmood, Saba (201). ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,’ Cultural Anthropology 16/2: 202-36. Makdisi, Ussama (2002). ‘Ottoman Orientalism,’ The American Historical Review 107/3: 768-96. Maksudyan, Nazan (2005). Türklü¤ü Ölçmek: Bilimkurgusal Antropoloji ve Türk Milliyetçili¤inin Irkç› Çehresi, 1925-1939, Istanbul: Metis. Mansell, Gerard (1982). Let Truth Be Told: 50 Years of BBC External Broadcasting, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Marcus, George E.; Fischer, Michael M.J. (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mardin, fierif (1962). The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (1973). ‘Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics,’ Daedalus 102/1: 169-91. — (1981). ‘Religion and Secularism in Turkey,’ in Atatürk: The Founder of a Nation State, eds. A. Kazanc›gil, E. Özbudun, London: C. Hurst and Company. —- (1990). Türkiye’de Toplum ve Siyaset, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (1991). Türk Modernleflmesi, ‹stanbul: ‹letiflim. — (2006). Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Marrouchi, Mustapha (2004). Edward Said at the Limits, Albany: State University of New York. Marvin, Carolyn (1988). When Old Technologies were New, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbembe, Achilles (2002). ‘On the Power of the False,’ Public Culture 14/3: 629-41.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

255

— (2003). ‘Necropolitics,’ Public Culture 15/1: 11-40. McClinctock, Anne (1997). ‘“No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Gender, Race and Nationalism,’ in Dangereous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives, eds. A. MacClinctock, E. Shohat, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McDonnell, James (1991). Public Service Broadcasting: A Reader, London: Routledge. Meriç, Cemal (1986). Kültürden ‹rfana, Istanbul: ‹nsan Yay›nlar›. Mignolo, Walter (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mitchell, Juliet (1987). Selected Melanie Klein, London: Free Press. Mitchell, Timothy (1991). Colonising Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press. — (2000). ‘The Stage of Modernity,’ in Questions of Modernity, ed. T. Mitchell, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düflünce: Modernleflme ve Bat›c›l›k (2002), vol.3, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Moore-Gilbert, Bart (1997). Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, London: Verso. Moores, Shaun (1993). Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption, London: Sage. Morley, David (1980). The ‘Nationwide’ Audience, London: British Film Institute. — (1983). ‘Cultural Transformations: The Politics of Resistance,’ in Language, Image, Media, eds. H. Davies, P. Walton, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — (1986). Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, London: Comedia. — (1989). ‘Changing Paradigms in Audience Studies,’ in Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power, eds. E. Seiter, H. Borchers, G. Kreutzner, E. Warth, London: Routledge. Morson, Gary Saul (ed) (1986). Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Morson, Gary Saul; Emerson, Caryl (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Mott, Robert (1990). Sound Effects: Radio, TV, and Film, Boston: Focal Press. Munck, Ronaldo (1986). The Difficult Dialogue: Marxism and Nationalism, London: Zed Books. Nader, L. (1989). ‘Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women,’ Cultural Dynamics 2/3: 324-55. Nairn, Tom (1977). The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, London: NLB. Najmabadi, Afsaneh (1998). ‘Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran,’ in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in Turkey, ed. L. Abu-Lughod, Princeton: Princteon University Press. Nalbanto¤lu, Gülsüm Baydar (1997). ‘Silent Interruptions: Urban Encounters with Rural Turkey,’ in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds. S. Bozdo¤an, R. Kasaba, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nandy, Ashis (1994). The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2002). Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nora, Pierre (1989). ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,’ Representations, special issue, Memory and Counter Memory, 26: 7-24. Norton, Anne (1988). Reflections on Political Identity, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

256

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

University Press. Nutku, Özdemir (1976). Yaflayan Tiyatro, Istanbul: Ça¤dafl Yay›nlar›. Oba, Ali Engin (1995). Türk Milliyetçili¤inin Do¤uflu, Ankara: ‹mge. Okyar, Osman; ‹nalc›k, Halil (eds) (1980). Social and Economic History of Turkey, 10711920, Ankara: Hacettepe University. Ong, Walter (1982). Orality and Literacy, London: Routledge. Osborne, Peter (1995). The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, London: Verso. Oskay, Ünsal (1978). Toplumsal Geliflmede Radyo ve Televizyon, Ankara: SBF. Ostovich, Steven T. (2002). ‘Epilogue: Dangerous Memories,’ in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, eds. A. Confino, P. Fritzsche, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ökçün, Gündüz (1971). 1920-1930 Y›llar› Aras›nda Kurulan Türk Anonim fiirketlerinde Yabanc› Sermaye, Ankara: SBF. Öncü, Ayfle (1981). ‘Turkish Women in the Professions: Why So Many?,’ in Women in Turkish Society, ed. N. Abadan-Unat, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Özbek, Meral (1991). Popüler Kültür ve Orhan Gencebay Arabeski, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Özbudun, Ergun (1975). Türkiye’de Sosyal De¤iflme ve Siyasal Kat›lma, Ankara: Hukuk Fakültesi Yay›nlar›. Özbudun, Ergun; Kazanc›gil, Ali (eds) (1981). Atatürk: Founder of a Modern State, London: C. Hurst and Company. Özgider, Seyfi (ed) (2004). Do¤u-Bat› K›skac›nda Türkiye, Istanbul: Ayk›r›. Özk›r›ml›, Umut (2008). Milliyetçilik ve Türkiye-AB ‹liflkileri, Istanbul: TESEV. Öztürkmen, Arzu (1998). Türkiye’de Folklor ve Milliyetçilik, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Özyürek, Esra (2004). ‘Wedded to the Republic: Public Intellectuals and IntimacyOriented Publics in Turkey,’ in Off Stage, On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture, ed. A. Shryock, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. — (2006). Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey, Durham: Duke University Press. Parla, Jale (1985). Efendilik, fiarkiyatç›l›k, Kölelik, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (1990). Babalar ve O¤ullar: Tanzimat Roman›n›n Epistemolojik Temelleri, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Parla, Jale; Irz›k, Sibel (eds) (2004). Kad›nlar Dile Düflünce: Edebiyat ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Parla, Taha (1985). The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gökalp, 1876-1924, Leiden: E. J. Brill. — (1991a). Türkiye’de Siyasal Kültürün Resmi Kaynaklar›: Atatürk’ün Nutku, vol.1, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (1991b). Türkiye’de Siyasal Kültürün Resmi Kaynaklar›: Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, vol.2, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (1992). Türkiye’de Siyasal Kültürün Resmi Kaynaklar›: Kemalist Tek Parti ‹deolojisi ve CHP’nin Alt› Oku, vol.3, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Parla, Taha; Davison, Andrew (2004). Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order?, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Parry, Benita (1992). ‘Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories: Edward Said’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism,’ in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. M. Sprinker, Cambridge: Blackwell. Pathak, Zakia; Sengupta, Sawati; Purkayastha, Sharmila (1991). ‘The Prisonhouse of

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

257

Orientalism,’ Textual Practice, 5/2: 195-218. Pechey, Graham (1983). ‘Bakhtin, Marxism, and Post-Structuralism,’ in The Politics of Theory, eds. F. Barker, M. Iverson, D. Loxley, P. Hume, Colchester: University of Essex Press. — (1989). ‘On the Borders of Bakhtin: Dialogization, Decolonization,’ in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, eds. K. Hirschkop, D. Shepherd, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Peker, Recep (1935). ‹nkilâp Dersleri, Ankara: Ulus Bas›mevi. Pekin, Müfide (ed) (2005) Yeniden Kurulan Yaflamlar: 1923 Türk-Yunan Zorunlu Nüfus Mübadelesi, Istanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi Yay›nlar›. Phillips, Adam (1995). Terrors and Experts, London: Faber and Faber. Porter, Denis (1993). ‘Orientalism and Its Problems,’ in Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, eds. P. Williams, L. Chrisman, London: Harvaster Wheatsheaf. Potts, John (1989). Radio in Australia, New South Wales: New South Wales University Press. Priessnitz, Horst J. (1981). ‘British Radio Drama: A Survey,’ in Radio Drama, ed. P. Lewis, London: Longman. Rabinow, Paul (1986). ‘Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and PostModernity in Anthropology,’ in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. J. Clifford, G. E. Marcus, Berkeley: University of California Press. — (1989). French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Cambridge: The MIT Press. — (1996). Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Radway, Janice (1984). Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rajchman, John (1991). Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics, London: Routledge. Read, Jason (2003). The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present, New York: State University of New York Press. Renan, Ernest (1990). ‘What is a Nation?’ in Nation and Narration, ed. H.K. Bhabha, London: Routledge. Richards, Barry (ed) (1984). Capitalism and Infancy: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Politics, London: Free Association Books. Richeri, Giuseppe (1980). ‘Italian Broadcasting and Fascism, 1924-1937,’ Media, Culture and Society 2: 49-56. Robbins, Bruce (1992). ‘The East is a Career: Edward Said and the Logics of Professionalism,’ in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. M. Sprinker, Cambridge: Blackwell. Robins, Kevin (1996). ‘Interrupting Identities: Turkey/Europe,’ in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. S. Hall, P. du Gay, London: Sage. Rose, Jacqueline (1984). The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, London: The Macmillan Press. Rowe, William; Schelling, Vivian (1991). Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America, London: Verso. Rowlands, Michael (1995). ‘Inconsistent Temporalities in a Nation-Space,’ in Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local, ed. D. Miller, London: Routledge.

258

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Rustow, Dankwart (1956). Politics and Westernization in the Near East, Princeton: Princeton University Press. — (1973). ‘The Modernization of Turkey in Historical and Comparative Perspective,’ in Social Change and Politics in Turkey: A Structural Historical Analysis, ed. K. Karpat, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Safa, Peyami (1990). Türk ‹nk›lâb›na Bak›fllar, Istanbul: Ötüken. Said, Edward (1983). The World, the Text, and the Critic, London: Vintage. — ‘Orientalism Reconsidered,’ Cultural Critique 1: 89-107. — (1986). ‘Foucault and the Imagination of Power,’ in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. D. C. Hoy, New York: Basil Blackwell. — (1993). Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage. — (1995). Orientalism, London: Penguin. Salamone, S.D. (1989). ‘The Dialectics of Turkish National Identity: Ethnic Boundary Maintenance and State Ideology,’ East European Quarterly 23/1: 33-61. Sayyid, Bobby (1997). A Fundemental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, London: Zed Books. Scannell, Paddy (1990). ‘Public Service Broadcasting: The History of a Concept,’ in Understanding Television, eds. A. Goodwin, G. Whannel, London: Routledge. — (1996). Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Scannell, Paddy; Cardiff, David (1991). A Social History of British Broadcasting, Volume One, 1922-1939: Serving the Nation, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — (1995). ‘The National Culture,’ in Approaches to Media: A Reader, eds. O. BoydBarrett, C. Newbold, London: Arnold. Schlesinger, Philip (1991). Media, Nation and State, London: Sage. Schmitt, Carl (2006). Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Chicago: University of Chicago. Selek, Sabahattin (1970). Milli Mücadele, Istanbul: A¤ao¤lu. Sertel, Zekeriya (1968). Hat›rlad›klar›m, 1905-1950, Istanbul: Yaylac›k Matbaas›. Seth, Sanjay (2007). ‘Changing the Subject: Western Knowledge and the Question of Difference,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 49/3: 666-88. Shaw, Stanford J.; Shaw, Ezel Kural (1977). History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol.II: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 18081975, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shayegan, Daryush (1993). Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, London: Saqi Books. Shiach, Morag (1989). ‘A History of Changing Definitions of “the Popular”,’ in Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender and History in Cultural Analysis, 1730 to the Present, Cambridge: Polity Press. Shick, Irvin C.; Tonak, Ertu¤rul A. (ed) (1987). Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shohat, Ella; Stam, Robert (1994). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London: Routledge. Shorter, Frederic C.; Macura, Miroslav (1982). Trends in Fertility and Mortality in Turkey, 1935-1975, Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Shukman, Ann (1983). ‘Introduction to “Bakhtin School Papers”,’ Russian Poetics in Translation 10: 4. Silverstone, Roger (1990). ‘Television and Everyday Life: Towards an Anthropology

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

259

of the Television Audience,’ in Public Communication: The New Imperatives: Future Directions for Media Research, ed. M. Ferguson, London: Sage. — (1994). Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Simmel, Georg (1973). ‘On the Theory of Theatrical Performance,’ in Sociology of Literature and Drama, eds. E. and T. Burns, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Simon, Sherry (1992). ‘The Language of Cultural Difference: Figures of Alterity in Canadian Translations,’ in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. L. Venuti, London: Routledge. Sirman, Nükhet (2000). ‘Writing the Usual Love Story: The Fashioning of Conjugal and National Subjects in Turkey,’ in Gender, Agency and Change, ed. Victoria Ana Goddard, London: Routledge. — (2005). ‘The Making of Familial Citizenship in Turkey,’ in Citizenship in a Global World: European Questions and Turkish Experiences, eds. A. ‹çduygu, F. Keyman, London: Routledge. Smith, Anthony D. (1983). Theories of Nationalism, New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers. Smith, Elaine D. (1959). Origins of the Kemalist Movement and the Government of the Grand National Assembly, Washington, DC: Judd & Detweiler Press. Spiegel, Gabrielle (2002). ‘Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time,’ History and Theory 41/2: 149-62. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1985). Feminism and Critical Theory,’ in For Alma Mater: Theory and Practice in Feminist Scholarship, eds. P.A. Treichler, C. Kramarae, B. Stafford, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. — (1987). In Other Worlds, London: Methuen. — (1993). ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?,’ in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. P. Williams, L. Chrisman, London: Harvaster Wheatsheaf. Steedman, Carolyn (2002). Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Sterne, Jonathan (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham: Duke University Press. Stevens, Maurice (1996). ‘Public (Re)Memory, Vindicating Narratives, and Troubling Beginnings: Toward a Critical Postcolonial Psychoanalytical Theory,’ in Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds. L.R. Gordon, T.D. Sharpley-Whiting, Oxford: Blackwell. Stokes, Martin (1992). The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey, Oxford: Clarendon. — (1998). ‘Imagining “the South”: Hybridity, Heterotopias and Arabesk on the Turkish-Syrian Border,’ in Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, eds. T.M. Wilson, H. Donnan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura (1995). Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Strathern, Marilyn (1995a). ‘No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case,’ in Nature, Culture and Gender, eds. C. MacCormack, M. Strathern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (ed) (1995b). Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge, London: Routledge. Strauss, Neil (1993). ‘Introduction,’ in Radiotext(e), ed. N. Strauss, Semiotext(e) 6/16. Sun, Muammer (1969). Türkiye’nin Kültür-Müzik-Tiyatro Sorunlar›, Ankara: Ajans

260

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Türk Matbaas›. Sunar, ‹lkay (1974). State and Society in the Politics of Turkey’s Development, Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Bas›mevi. Surkis, Judith (2006). Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 18701920, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Szyliowicz, Joseph S. (1973). Education and Modernization in the Middle East, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. fiener, Sevda (1971). Ça¤dafl Türk Tiyatrosunda Ahlak, Ekonomi, Kültür Sorunlar›, 1923-1970, Ankara: Ankara Dil Tarih Co¤rafya Fakültesi Yay›nlar›. fienyap›l›,Tans› (1985). Ankara Kentinde Gecekondu Geliflimi, 1923-1960, Ankara: Bat›kent Konut Üretim Yap› Kooperatifleri Birli¤i. Tachau, Frank (1984). ‘The Political Culture of Kemalist Turkey,’ in Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. J. M. Landau, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Tanp›nar, Ahmet Hamdi (1979). ‘Istanbul’, in Befl fiehir, Istanbul: Dergah Yay›nlar›. Tarcan, Selim S›rr› (1948). Halk Danslar› ve Tarcan Zeybe¤i, Istanbul: Ülkü Bas›mevi. Targhi, Mohamed Tavakoli (2000). Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography, Hampshire: Palgrave. Taussig, Michael (1993). Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, London: Routledge. Taylor, Philip M. (1981). The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 1919-1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (2001). British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tekeli, fiirin (ed) (1995). Women in Modern Turkish Society, London: Zed Books. Tekelio¤lu, Orhan (1996). ‘The Rise of a Spontaneous Synthesis: The Historical Background of Turkish Popular Music,’ in Turkey: Identity, Democracy, Politics, ed. S. Kedourie, London: Frank Cass. Terdiman, Richard (1993). Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Timur, Taner (1968). Türk Devrimi, Ankara: Sevinç Matbaas›. — (1971). Türk Devrimi ve Sonras›, 1919-1946, Ankara: Do¤an. Tonguç, Hakk› (1938). Köyde E¤itim, Istanbul: Devlet Bas›mevi. — (1947). Canland›r›lacak Köy, Istanbul: Remzi. Tonnesson, Stein (1994). ‘Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Knowing about Others,’ NIASnytt 2: 14-18. Toprak, Zafer (1995). ‘Ayd›n, Ulus-Devlet ve Popülizm,’ in Türk Ayd›n› ve Kimlik Sorunu, ed. S. fien, Istanbul: Ba¤lam. Toynbee, Arnold J. (1925). ‘The Turkish State of Mind,’ The Atlantic Monthly, 136: 548-60. Trimberger, Ellen Kay (1977). Revolution From Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Egypt, Peru, Turkey and Japan, Brunswick: Transaction Books. Tunaya, Tar›k Zafer (1952). Türkiye’de Siyasi Partiler, Istanbul: Do¤an Kardefl Bas›mevi. — (1956). ‘Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’ndan TBMM Hükümeti Rejimine Geçifl,’ in M.R. Sevi¤’e Arma¤an, Istanbul. — (1983). Devrim Hareketleri ‹çinde Atatürk ve Atatürkçülük, Ankara: Turhan. — (1989). Medeniyetin Bekleme Odas›nda, Istanbul: Ba¤lam. — (1996). Türkiye’nin Siyasi Hayat›nda Bat›l›laflma Hareketleri, Istanbul: Arba.

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

261

Tunçay, Mete (1981). Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nde Tek-Parti Yönetiminin Kurulmas›, 19231961, Ankara: Yurt. Turner, Bryan S. (1994). Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, London: Routledge. Tusa, John (1992). A World in Your Ear: Reflections on Changes, London: Broadside Books Limited. Türko¤lu, Ömer (1996). ‘Halkevlerinin Kurulufl Amaçlar›, Örgütsel Yap›s› ve Baz› Uygulamalar›,’ Kebikeç 3: 97-106. Ülken, Hilmi Ziya (no date). Ziya Gökalp: Hayat›, Fikirleri ve Eserlerinden Parçalar, Istanbul: Kanat Kütüphanesi. — (1971). Aflk Ahlak›, Ankara: Sevinç Matbaas›. Ünder, Hasan (1996). ‘Türk Devriminin Felsefesi,’ Mürekkep 6: 31-48. Üstel, Füsun (1994). ‘1920’li ve 30’lu Y›llarda “Milli Musiki” ve “Musiki ‹nkilab›”,’ Defter 22: 41-53. — (2004). ‘Makbul Vatandafl’›n Peflinde: II.Meflrutiyet’ten Bugüne Vatandafll›k E¤itimi, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Venn, Couze (1993). Occidentalism and its Discontents, London: University of East London, New Ethnicities Unit. — (2000). Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity, London: Sage. Vergès, Françoise (2004). ‘Françoise Vergès: Postcolonial Challenges,’ in The Future of Social Theory, ed. N. Gane, London: Continuum. Verynois, Speros (1991). The Turkish State and History: Clio Meets the Grey Wolf, Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies. Voloshinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, New York: Seminar Press. Walker, Andrew (1992). A Skyful of Freedom: 60 Years of the BBC World Service, London: Broadside Books Limited. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991). ‘The French Revolution as a World-Historical Event,’ in Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms, Cambridge: Polity Press. Ward, R.E.; Rustow, D.A. (eds) (1964). Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weidman, Amanda (2003). ‘Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real,’ Public Culture 15/3: 453-76. Weiker, Walter (1973). Political Tutelage and Democracy in Turkey: The Free Party and its Aftermath, Leiden: E. J. Brill. — (1981). The Modernization of Turkey: From Atatürk to the Present Day, London: Holmes and Meier Publishers. Weisband, Edward (1973). Turkish Foreign Policy, 1943-1945: Small State Diplomacy and Great Power Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. White, Allon (1984). ‘Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction,’ in The Theory of Reading, ed. F. Gloversmith, Brighton: Harvaster. — (1988). ‘The Struggle over Bakhtin: Fraternal Reply to Robert Young,’ Cultural Critique 8: 217-41. Williams, Gareth (2002). The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America, Durham: Duke University Press. Williams, Raymond (1958). Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

262

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

— (1983). Keywords, London: Fontana. — (1991). Writing in Society, London: Verso. — (1993). ‘Culture is Ordinary,’ in Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, eds. A. Gray, J. McGuigan, London: Edward Arnold. Winter, Michael (1984). ‘Modernization of Education in Kemalist Turkey,’ in Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. Jacob M. Landau, Boulder: Westview Press; Leiden: E.J. Brill. Yavuz, M. Hakan (2003). Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, London: Oxford University Press. Ye¤en, Mesut (1995). ‘Türk Devlet Söylemi ve Cumhuriyet Kurumlar›,’ Mürekkep 5: 37-46. — (1999). Devlet Söyleminde Kürt Sorunu, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (2006). Müstakbel Türk’ten Sözde Vatandafla: Cumhuriyet ve Türkler, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. — (2007). ‘Turkish Nationalism and the Kurdish Question,’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 30/1: 119-51. Yeflilkaya, Nefle G. (1999). Halkevleri: ‹deoloji ve Mimarl›k, Istanbul: ‹letiflim. Y›ld›r›m, Onur (2006). Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of populations, 1922-1934, London: Routledge. Y›ld›r›m, Suat (2002). Oryantalistlerin Yan›lg›lar›: Oryantalistlerin ‹slam Araflt›rmalar› Üzerine Düflünceler, Istanbul: Ufuk Kitaplar›. Young, Robert (1986). ‘Back to Bakhtin,’ Cultural Critique 2: 71-92. — (1990). White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, London: Routledge. — (1995a). Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London: Routledge. — (1995b). ‘Foucault, Race and Colonialism,’ New Formations 25: 57-65. Yurchak, Alexei (2006). Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira (1997). Gender and Nation, London: Sage. Yuval-Davis, Nira; Anthias, Floya (eds) (1989). Women-Nation-State, London: Macmillan. Yücebafl, Hilmi (1961). Neyzen Tevfik ve fiiirleri, Istanbul: Aka. Zeydano¤lu, Welat (2008). ‘“The White Turkish Man’s Burden”: Orientalism, Kemalism and the Kurds in Turkey,’ in Neo-Colonial Mentalities in Contemporary Europe? Language and Discourse in the Construction of Identities, eds. G. Rings, A. Ife, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Zizek, Slavoj (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso. — (1990). ‘Beyond Discourse Analysis,’ in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, ed. E. Laclau, London: Verso. — (1991). For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London: Verso. — (1992). Looking Awry, Cambridge: The MIT Press. — (1996). ‘“I Hear You with my Eyes;” or, The Invisible Master,’ in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. R. Salecl, S. Zizek, Durham: Duke University Press. — (2000). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso. Zürcher, Eric J. (1984). The Unionist Factor, the Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement 1905-1926, Leiden: E.J. Brill. — (2004). Turkey: A Modern History, London: I. B. Tauris.

INDEX

Abal›o¤lu, Yunus Nadi, 19 Ad›var, Halide Edip, 54, 227n Agamben, Giorgio, 224n A¤ao¤lu, Samet, 212n Ahmad, Feroz, 62, 201n, 211n, 212n, 213n, 215n Akses, Necil Kaz›m, 216n Aksoy, Bülent, 216n Alemdar, Korkmaz, 198n Allied forces, 103, 126 ‘alternative modernities’ (Göle), 191 Anatolian Agency, 73, 87, 214n, 218n, 219n, 225n And, Metin, 162, 164, 234n Anderson, Benedict, 9-10, 30, 42, 197n, 198n, 236n ‘imagined community’, 10, 30, 197n Imagined Communities, 9 Ankara, 18-20, 32-3, 65, 72-3, 75, 115, 201n, 202n, 215n, 217n, 221n Radio, 14, 19, 32-3, 44, 63, 65, 73-5, 77, 82-6, 90, 118, 122, 125-6, 131, 135-6, 159, 164-7, 215n, 217n, 225n, 226n, 229n, 231n, 233n, 234n Radio opening, 83 Anthias, Floya, 130 anti-westernism, 4, 5, 41, 72, 207n Arab, 107, 109, 227n Arabic, 5, 23, 82, 97-9, 107, 120, 207n, 209n, 213n, 216n states, 99, 109, 119, 193, 209n archive, archiving 29-41, 52-3, 68, 122, 204n, 205n, 206n, 208n

missing archives, 26, 29, 30, 37, 39, 41, 208n Arl›, Alim, 208n Arnheim, Rudolf, 162, 232n Artam, Nurettin, 23, 88, 203n, 217n, 235n Ataç, Galip, 135, 137, 139, 140-1, 226n Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 8, 15, 19, 35, 39, 44, 59, 71-2, 75, 78-9, 80-1, 83, 145, 162, 202n, 210n, 211n, 212n, 216n, 217n, 226n, 229n, 230n Atay, Falih R›fk›, 19, 70, 79, 202n, 230n At›f, Nafi, 227n Attali, Jacques, 219n aural representation, 4, 22, 90, 197n Australia radio broadcasting, 95, 214n, 218n Axis states, 94, 97, 99, 102, 126 Aydemir, fievket Süreyya, 218n Ayd›n, Cemil, 17 Ayla, Safiye, 73 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 41, 101, 166, 233n ‘superaddressee’, 41, 191 Balaghi, Shiva, 184, 243n Baltac›o¤lu, ‹smay›l Hakk›, 75-6, 77, 78, 90, 215n, 217n, 219n Barfield, Ray, 21, 218n Bari Radio, 126 Barlas, ‹hsan, 218n Barry, Andrew, 97, 211n Bartok, Bela, 217n

264

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Bauman, Zygmunt, 95, 161, 220n Bayar, Celal, 214n Baysal, Jale, 205n BBC at War (Antonia White), 224n BBC Overseas Intelligence Department, 99 BBC Turkish Section criticisms from Turkey, 87, 114-5, 222n Drama Department, 163, 230n, 231n English lessons, 107, 221n language criticism, 222n multiculturalism, 36 neutrality, 100-1 problems of translation, 107, 114 propaganda, 94, 97-9, 100, 105, 121, 125, 220n, 221n, 222n Service, 4, 23, 26-7, 36-7, 46, 93-5, 98, 103, 106, 108-9, 111-3, 117-9, 121, 123, 127, 160, 183, 186, 229n strategy of flattery, 105, 109, 110, 121 Belge, Burhan Asaf, 21, 23, 67, 82, 85-6, 88, 202n, 203n, 217n, 218n Benjamin, Walter, 9, 76, 199n, 230n Bennington, Geoffrey, 66 Berland, Jody, 24-25, 67 Bhabha, Homi, 91, 198n, 206n, 209n, 228n Bilir, Zehra, 73 Bisbee, Eleanor, 62, 213n Bora, Tan›l, 213n Boran, Orhan, 34-5 boundary management, 14-5, 17-8, 20, 26, 45, 56, 65, 70, 72, 81, 89, 112, 160, 178-9, 183 Bowen, Harold, 62, 108, 200 Briggs, Asa, 220n Britain, 2, 31, 37, 61, 67, 90, 94-9, 100, 104-6, 108, 119, 120, 123-4, 126, 159, 163, 214n, 224n, 230n Commonwealth, 121 Empire Service, 95-7 radio broadcasting, see BBC Browne, Donald R., 218n Buruma, Ian, 4, 5, 207n

Butler, Judith, 192, 201n Cankaya, Özden, 203n Cantek, Funda fienol, 202n Cardiff, David, 2, 21, 205n, 220n, 231n, 235n Carey, James, 215n Carrier, James, 15 Celal, Necip, 214n Cemil, Mesut, 218n censorship, 36, 87, 102, 159, 164-5, 203n, 212n, 225n, 231n centralisation, 21, 34, 75, 83, 189, 213n, 215n, 217n Chakrabarty, Gayatri, 38, 207n Chatterjee, Partha, 10, 161, 198n, 206n, 207n, 212n, 227n Cheah, Pheng, 198n Chen, Xiaomei, 5 child, 20, 87, 130-2, 138-140, 143-5, 149, 152, 160, 177, 227n childhood, 9, 144, 153, 227n childishness, 34-5, 131, 146, 159 Churchill, Winston, 102, 197n civilisation, 10-1, 14, 18, 22, 38, 41-3, 46, 48, 57-61, 63, 65, 67, 71, 79, 80, 83, 95, 105, 124-5, 130-2, 136, 139, 140, 142, 148, 153, 155, 160, 167, 183, 186, 191, 200n, 204n, 211n, 229n codification, 16, 30, 40-1, 118, 120, 122-3, 163, 187 communication, 21, 53, 57, 70, 82, 121-2, 134, 178, 188-9, 199n, 236n revolution, 199n technology, 2, 9, 12 individual communication, 24 mass communication, 24, 187-8 ‘true communication’, 188, 235n, 236n Comte, August, 200n Coronil, Fernando, 5, 6 Crisell, Andrew, 21, 159, 163-4, 166, 233n 'collision' (Lukacs), 172, 179, 234n colonialism, 6, 13, 47, 111, 185-6, 192-3

INDEX ‘crypto-colonialism’ (Herzfeld), 185 anti-colonialism, 10 communism, 61, 94-5 Compaigne Française de Radio, 70 Conservatory, 85, 125, 219n, 231n 'conventional symbolisation' (Strathern) 131-2, 154 cosmopolitanism, 18, 72-4, 77, 200n culture, 4, 10-4, 22, 39, 53, 57-8, 60, 63, 67, 77, 80, 94, 106, 113, 131-2,154-6, 198n, 204n culture/civilisation, 58, 67, 79, 151, 198n Çelebi, Sait, 44 ‘dangerous memories’ (Ostovich), 190 Davison, Andrew, 199n, 210n, 235n Deedes, Wyndham, General, Sir, 221n Deleuze, Gilles, 187 Democratic Party (DP), 3, 203n Derrida, Jacques, 33, 208n Deutsch, Karl, 236n dialogical, dialogism, 3, 4, 7, 14, 20-1, 27, 35, 39, 41-3, 53, 56, 91, 101, 118, 123, 179, 228n dialogic leakage, 25 Dink, Hrant, 190, 201n, 236n disembodiment, 1, 25-6, 44, 63, 86, 131, 137, 143, 149, 178, 184, 194, 205n Dolar, Mladen, 48 Donald, James, 205n, 206n Dumont, Paul, 62, 211n Duru, Kaz›m Nami, 138, 142, 145, 150-153, 228n Dyson, Frances, 67, 228n East/West binary, 56, 184, 209n 'bridge between East and West’, 15-19, 39, 45, 51, 56, 62, 152, 185, 200n Eastern Europe, 123, 223n Ebcio¤lu, Hikmet Münir, 88 Eisenstadt, S.N., 202n, 211n elite, 3, 10, 11, 17, 19, 20-2, 25, 27, 44-5, 48-52, 55, 57, 59-62, 65, 67, 71-2, 74-9, 80, 84-5, 90-1, 93, 95, 110, 113, 117, 120, 124,

265

126-7, 130-1, 133-4, 137-8, 142, 148-9, 151, 153-6, 160-1, 180-1, 183-4, 186, 191, 192, 199n, 200n, 202n, 204n, 210n, 211n, 213n, 217n, 229n, 233n embodiment, 25-6, 30, 54-5, 78, 83, 105, 137, 155, 167, 184, 205n, 210n Emerson, Caryl, 166, 233n Emile (Rousseau), 144-145, 154 Erdemgil, Serpil, 205n Erdo¤an, R. Tayyip, 191-2, 235n Ersoy, Mehmet Akif, 191 Erten, Radife, 217n Ertu¤, Celal, 135, 226n Ertu¤, Hasan Refik, 77, 218n Ertu¤rul, Muhsin, 232n Esen, Hayri, 35, 228n essence, essentialism, 41, 43-4, 55, 66-7, 86, 107, 127, 130, 143, 147, 155, 168, 184, 192, 194, 229n Esslin, Martin, 159 exceptionalism, 8, 9, 11, 13, 125 family, 24, 89, 130, 138-141, 161-2, 178, 193-4, 229n, 230n, 231n, 234n 'failure', 4, 11-2, 25, 27, 31, 34-6, 53, 95, 115, 122, 147, 189, 194, 209n Fanon, Frantz, 47, 209n, 214n fantasy, 6, 14, 17, 24-5, 43, 45, 48, 50-51, 53, 63, 66, 76, 116, 124-5, 127, 131, 165, 188-9, 190, 192, 208n, 234n, 235n, 236n; see also Occidental fantasy fascism, 61, 93, 75, 199n, 209n fatherhood, 138-9 feminine, femininity, 17, 67, 131, 138, 143, 159, 174, 226n, 228n feminisation, 22, 129, 131, 137, 144, 156, 160, 210, 227n Foucault, Michel, 24, 37-8, 45-7, 53, 57, 189, 202n, 206n, 208n, 209n, 226n ‘antagonisms of strategies’, 46, 208n The Archeology of Knowledge, 208n ‘historical a priori’, 38, 206n

266

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

France, 139, 144, 169, 198n Freud, Sigmund, 47-50, 141, 209n Gellner, Ernest, 197n gender, 11, 14, 20, 23-4, 26, 129, 138, 152, 154, 168, 179, 186, 191, 193, 199n, 201n, 209n, 230n gendering, 27, 129-130, 160-1, 173, 180, 193-4, 226n General Bureau of Press and Publications, 68, 87, 204n Germany, 61, 75, 89, 103-4, 124, 144, 203n, 219n radio broadcasting, 91, 102, 106, 203n, 226n, 227n, 230n Giddens, Anthony, 236n Goffman, Erving, 231 government, 46, 62, 71, 91, 96-9, 105, 113, 129, 147, 186, 192-3, 212n, 226n Gökalp, Ziya, 56-9, 60, 78-9, 155, 198n, 204n, 210n, 211n, 216n, 235n Göle, Nilüfer, 191, 199n Gray, Frances, 163 Graves, Cecil, 97-8 Greenfeld, Liah, 203n Gülalp, Haldun, 127 Gülizar, Jülide, 223n Güntekin, Reflat Nuri, 233n Gürbilek, Nurdan, 227n, 228n Habermas, Jürgen, 236n Hall, Stuart, 30 Hanafi, Hassan, 5, 197n, 207n Harootunian, Harry, 30, 42-3, 207n Hasgül, Necdet, 85, 216n Havas Agency, 87, 218n, 219n Hayreden, Hayrettin M., 71-72 Heidegger, Martin, 37 Herzfeld, Michael, 30, 185, 205n, 206n, 216n H›z›r, Neriman, 231n high/low culture, 20, 89, 163, 231n Hillelson, S., 107-8, 114-5, 221n Hilmes, Michele, 21-3, 25, 203n, 235n history, 26-9, 30-2, 34, 37-9, 40-1, 45, 48-9, 50, 54, 56, 66, 78, 130,

135, 167, 186-8, 190, 204n, 206n, 208n Hitler, Adolf, 96, 102, 203n Mein Kampf, 96 hörspiel, 163, 230n Huyssen, Andreas, 131, 161 ‹lkin, Nedim Veysel, 68, 214n ‹mer, Ertu¤rul, 32, 165, 233n imperialism, 9, 15, 59, 153 Independence Tribunals, 212n individual, 47-9, 89, 122, 143, 235n individualisation, 24, 74, 187 infantilisation, 22, 34, 49, 137, 156, 160 inferiority, 9, 47, 49, 50-3, 153 ‹nönü, ‹smet, 44, 83, 213n internal/external truth, 26, 37, 53, 127, 183 intimacy, 2, 26, 39, 45, 63, 71, 81, 127, 130, 192, 195, 206 ‘invention’ (Gellner), 30, 197n irrationality, 52, 190, 209n Islam, 16-7, 55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 192, 209n, 210n, 213n Istanbul, 3, 9, 18-9, 26, 55, 70, 73-7, 167-9, 170-1, 173 Radio, 19, 65, 71, 73-5, 77, 83, 88, 122, 135, 204n, 214n, 215n, 218n, 223n re-inauguration of Istanbul Radio, 223n Radio closing down, 19 Italy, 61, 75, 124, 144, 214n radio broadcasting, 68, 106, 126 James, C. L. R., 46 Jews, Jewish, 98, 201, 219, 223, 227 Johnson, Lesley, 67, 214n, 218n Jordanova, L. J., 229n joy, joyfulness, 126, 131, 145, 148-9, 151-2, 154 Kad›o¤lu, Ayfle, 77, 199n, 215n Kadro journal, 202n, 217n, 218n Kam, Ruflen Ferit, 68 Kamay, Behçet, 135, 146-7, 150, 226n Kandiyoti, Deniz, 139, 194, 199,

INDEX 227n, 228n, 230n Karaosmano¤lu, Yakup Kadri, 54-5, 62, 82, 202, 210, 217n, 219n Kartal, A. T., 111-2 Kasaba, Reflat, 11-2, 59, 199n Katz, Sheila Hannah, 193, 227n Kemalism, 11, 61-2, 77, 192, 210n, 230n Kemalist reforms, 15, 19, 60, 62, 199n, 213n, 215n, 221n Keyder, Ça¤lar, 199n, 235n Kirkpatrick, Ivone, 100, 221n Kocabaflo¤lu, Uygur, 3-4, 33, 68-72, 74-6, 79, 83, 86-7, 126, 132, 135, 164, 203n, 205n, 214n, 215n, 217n, 219n, 225n, 228n, 233n Koçak, Orhan, 200n, 224n Lacan, Jacques, 48, 51, 209n Lacey, Katherine E. R., 89, 226n, 227n Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 234n language, 9, 22, 26, 30, 57, 85, 114, 131, 166, 187, 198n Larpent, George, Sir, 200n Lasch, Christopher, 234n Lewis, Bernard, 12, 40-3, 187, 199n, 206n, 235n Lewis, Peter, 163 liberal, 55, 67-8, 74, 89, 125, 131, 202n, 203n, 206n, 213n govermentality, 24 neo-liberal, 192 Ludwig, Emile, 80 Lukacs, Georges, 172, 234n MacKenzie, John, 111, 220n, 224n Mahmood, Saba, 206n Mair, John, 120, 223n Mango, Andrew, 118, 221n, 223n Mansell, Gerard, 94-9, 105, 111, 220n, 224n Manyas, Nezih, 24, 203n, 232n Marconi Company, 83-4, 90, 123 Mardin, fierif, 16, 18, 60, 85, 188-9, 210n, 211n Margalit, Avishai, 4, 5, 207n marriage, 138, 140-4, 175-6, 178 Marvin, Carolyn, 36, 215n

267

masculine, masculinity, 17, 67, 138-9, 226n Mbembe, Achilles, 209n McClinctock, Anne, 130 ‘mediating operators’ (Strathern), 47, 131, 152, 154-5 memoirs, 20, 34, 54, 63, 68, 71-2, 77, 81, 95, 126, 202n, 217n, 219n, 220n, 223n Middle East, 12, 15-6, 41, 99, 106, 199n, 216n, 227n Mignolo, Walter, 5, 6, 13, 46 The Ministry of Information (MOI), 95, 98, 100, 102-3, 108, 111, 114 Mitchell, Timothy, 206n, 210n, 228n model/copy, 11-2, 35, 91, 186, 197n modern/traditional binary, 15, 41, 44-5, 139, 178 modernisation, 3, 11-3, 27, 35, 37, 41, 52, 56, 60, 63, 69, 75, 80, 87, 171, 185-7, 199n, 207n, 210n, 235n modernity, 2, 3, 5, 6, 11-7, 27, 31, 37-9, 40-6, 60, 65-7, 72, 74-5, 110-1, 127, 131, 161, 178, 191, 193, 197n, 204n, 206n, 207n, 209n, 228n, 230n, 232n Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 183, 201n, 209n, 234n Morson, Gary Saul, 166, 233n Mott, Robert, 232n multiculturalism, 36, 205n multucultural media, 36 music alaturka, 65, 78-79, 80-2, 86, 88, 117, 148-9, 216n, 217n, 227n arabesk, 217n folk music, 23, 85-6, 89, 166, 184, 216n, 217n Greek, Kurdish, Armenian songs, 86 Turkish music, 73, 78-9, 80-2, 86, 118, 215n, 217n, 223n Western music, 23, 73, 79, 80, 86-7, 117, 215n, 216n, 223n myth, mythical, de-mythologizing, 8, 30, 59, 162, 180, 198n Mussolini, B., 102, 217n Nadi, Nadir, 19, 133, 225n

268

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 139, 144, 227n nation-building, 2, 3, 20, 22, 94, 137 national identity, 3, 8-12, 26-7, 41-3, 48, 55, 59, 62, 65-6, 76, 79, 80, 86, 93, 117, 120, 173, 199n, 228n, 235n nationalism, 4, 8-11, 16, 18-20, 28, 45, 48, 50, 53, 58, 61, 75, 77-8, 83, 95, 105, 129, 139, 152-3, 185, 188, 190-2, 197n, 198n, 199n, 203n, 206n, 213n, 227n, 236n nature, 27, 61, 129, 131-2, 139, 148-151, 154-5, 160, 162, 166, 171, 184, 229n natural, 129, 130, 138, 144, 150-1, 154-5 nature/civilisation, 155, 160 nature/culture, 131-2, 139, 149, 150, 155, 171 Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 199n, 237n Newman, Cardinal, 200n news broadcasts, programmes, reporting, 87, 89, 99, 103, 106, 109, 125, 219n, 228n non-Muslim, 17, 62, 190, 201n, 210n, 212n non-Western, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 30, 38, 42-3, 47, 53, 118, 139, 193, 205n, 206n, 207n, 209n Occidental fantasy, 3, 4, 14, 17, 27-28, 53, 55, 63, 90, 127, 131, 180-1, 184, 186, 189, 194 Occidentalism, 4-8, 13-8, 26-7, 29, 39-43, 45, 48, 53-4, 61, 82, 108-9, 151, 160, 183-4, 186, 188, 191-2, 194-5, 197n, 199n, 201n, 207n, 208n, 210n Orient, Orientalness, 5, 6, 16, 43, 107, 184, 186, 192, 195, 199n, 209n, 223n Orientalism (Said), 7, 41, 43, 45, 184 Orientalism, 5, 6, 7, 13, 15-6, 18, 41-3, 45, 56, 107, 132, 153, 184, 197n, 198n, 199n, 200n, 201n, 206n, 209n, 210n Osborne, Peter, 13, 31, 66, 204n

Osmano¤lu, Suat, 219n, 225n Other, the, 5, 6, 7, 8, 26, 40, 42-3, 47, 104, 116, 184, 190, 192, 228n Ottoman Empire, 7, 15-6, 35, 54, 56-9, 62, 78, 197n, 200n, 201n, 205n, 209n, 212n, 213n, 215n Öngören, Mahmut Tali, 203n, 219n Öz, Vahi (Vahyi), 158 Özakman, Turgut, 205n, 219n Özbekkan, Z. G., 116 Özk›r›ml›, Umut, 236n Özyürek, Esra, 199n, 236n Parla, Taha, 199n, 202n patriarchy, 12, 62, 227n Pechey, Graham, 25 Pehlivan, Osman, 81 people, the, 4, 25-6, 30, 44-5, 50, 54-6, 79, 84, 98, 117, 126, 133-4, 137, 139, 151, 170-2, 189, 198n, 204n, 211n, 226n People's Houses, the, 78, 84-5, 142, 152, 189, 213n, 227n, 229n London Branch of, 221n Persian Service, 119 personalisation, 33-5, 38, 63, 104, 109, 179, 194 Phillips, Adam, 190 populism, 24, 61, 63, 77, 203n, 213n Portugal, 111 post-colonial criticism, 10, 13, 46-7, 105, 185, 207n power, 6, 7, 11, 14, 17, 21, 28, 30, 39, 41, 46, 111, 123-4, 129, 149, 184, 193, 208n, 219n, 236n, 237n ‘bio-power’ (Foucault), 147, 202n Priessnitz, Horst, 230n, 231n progress, 11, 39, 59, 60, 65, 67, 84, 104-105, 110, 130, 147, 150, 153-4, 161, 191, 206, 214, 229 Progressive Republican Party, 212n psychoanalysis, 30, 47-9, 50, 53, 141, 181, 190, 209n PTT, 83 public sphere, 24-5, 67, 75, 88, 104, 115, 130, 139, 141-3, 162, 227n, 234n public/private dualism, 24, 25, 67, 88,

INDEX 115, 130, 139, 141-3, 234n ‘pure national voice’, 65, 83, 90-1 Rabinow, Paul, 202n, 223n radio announcers, announcement, 70, 73, 83, 92, 106, 115, 117, 203n, 223n Radio Times, 231n radio, and democracy, 23, 67, 122 and war; 2, 94, 106, 117, 219n, 224n, 228n audience surveys, 88, 106, 188, 218n, 229n blind medium, 162-4 education and entertainment, 24-5, 67, 73-4, 79, 130, 132-3, 135, 138, 143, 160, 163, 216n family dramas, 162, 180, 219n listeners, 44, 69, 73, 103-7, 112, 214n, 218n, 224n, 226n, 231n local stations, 203n nationalisation, 18, 72, 82-3, 131-2 potential audience, population, 23, 63, 89, 90, 96, 99, 191, 186, 232n, 236n private broadcasting, 202n programmes, 2, 31, 48, 68, 85-8, 106, 111, 132-4, 155, 194, 203n, 205n, 225n, 228n radio plays, 159, 160-6, 230-1 receivers, 25, 71, 83-4, 217n regular transmission, 73, 214n ‘seeing with the ear’, 21, 85 speech, 8, 24, 31, 35, 44-5, 59, 80-1, 83, 87, 90, 132, 134, 145, 166, 206n, 221n transmitters, 22, 34, 69, 76, 83-4, 125, 130 Radyo journal, 68, 88, 92, 124, 126, 128-9, 157-8, 182, 203n, 214n, 217n, 218n, 219n, 224n, 225n, 226n, 228n, 231n, 232n, 233n, 235n, 237n Ramiz, 128, 157, 225n rationality, 46-7, 52, 205n, 208n, 209n Rattansi, Ali, 205n, 206n reason, 45-7, 208n, 209n, 228n

269

Renan, Ernest, 228n Republican People's Party, 20, 61 Reuters Agency, 87, 218n, 219n, 225n Revolutionism/Reformism, 61, 77, 213n Rey, Cemal Reflit, 86, 216n Rice (MOI), 100-2, 108-9, 111, 113-4, 116, 222n Robins, Kevin, 12-13 Roosevelt, Theodor, 225n Rose, Jacqueline, 152 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 144-5, 153-5 Russia, 103-4; see also Soviet Union Safa, Peyami, 17, 56, 82, 216n, 217n, Said, Edward, 7, 43, 45, 184, 199n, 209n ‘intertwined histories' 7, 35, 41 Sar›sözen, Mustafa, 85 Sarper, Selim, 124n, 125n, 126n, 219n, 224n Saydam, Refik, 91 Sayyid, Bobby, 15-7 Scannell, Paddy, 2, 21, 134, 205n, 220n, 231n, 235n secularism, laicism, 16-7, 57, 77, 199n, 213n, 230n, 237n Serez, Naci, 224n Sertel, Zekeriya, 222n Seth, Sanjay, 237n Simmel, Georg, 167 Sirman, Nükhet, 139, 199n, 227n Smith, Anthony, 199n socialism, 75 sound, 2, 18, 20-1, 23-6, 44, 67-9, 162-8, 179, 191, 218n soundscape, 162-3, 179, 191, 233n sound technology, 167, 228n Soviet Union, 61, 74-5, 120, 206n, 213n, 214n, 218n, 220n, 225n radio broadcasting 218n Spiegel, Gabrielle M., 204n Spivak, Gayatri C., 209n Stephenson, Donald, 101, 114-5, 229n Sterne, Jonathan, 2, 197n Stokes, Martin, 216n, 217n Strathern, Marilyn, 131-2, 154

270

OCCIDENTALISM IN TURKEY

subjectivity, political subjectivity, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 17, 26, 29, 39-41, 44, 47-8, 52-3, 56, 63, 134, 137, 141, 154, 160-2, 167-8, 179, 180, 200n, 207n Surkis, Judith, 139, 227n fiadan, ‹zeddin, 49-52, 210n fierif, Muzaffer, 133, 226n fiirket Telsizinden Devlet Radyosuna (Kocabaflo¤lu), 214n Taner, Haldun, 164 Tanp›nar, Ahmet Hamdi, 215n Tanr›över, Hamdullah Suphi, 60, 212n Tarcan, Selim S›rr›, 135, 137-8, 141-2, 144-6, 148-154, 226n, 227n Tafler, Suat, 88 technology, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10-15, 17, 19, 21-7, 30, 35, 44-5, 50, 60, 65, 69, 71, 79, 90, 96, 122-3, 132, 151, 160-1, 166-7, 179, 180-1, 183, 197n, 198n, 208n Tekelio¤lu, Orhan, 216n, 217n television, 34, 191, 203n, 223n Telsiz journal, 69, 70, 214n, 215n, 218n Telsiz Telefon Türk Anonim fiirketi (TTTAfi), 69, 72, 76, 83 temporality, 30, 39, 60, 66, 77 circular time, 34 ‘now and here’, 25, 66 the present and the future, 162 Temren, Tahsin, 165-6, 233n Tevfik, Neyzen, 79 Toynbee, Arnold, 62, 106, 220n Tör, Vedat Nedim, 132, 136, 219n, 226n Tözem, Kemal, 164, 165, 231n, 232n, 233n TRT, 31, 33-4, 122, 165, 202n, 204n, 208n, 214n, 223n, 232n state broadcasting monopolisation, 110 truth, 26, 37, 91, 93, 97, 103, 105, 108, 119, 121, 124, 160, 173, 184, 186, 189, 225n truthfulness, 95, 99, 101, 103, 119 discourse of truth, 53, 94, 96, 118,

121 Tunaya, Zafer Tar›k, 38, 61 Tuncay, Mete, 212n, 214n Turco-German Non-Aggression Pact, 100, 105, 107, 219n, 220n Turkification, 23, 55, 82, 85, 189, 201n Turkish National Anthem Debate, 60, 212n Turkish History Institute, 78 Turkish identity, 16, 70, 114, 117, 183-4 Turkish Language Association, 78, 115 Turkish Revolution, 133, 162, 211n, 227n Turkish-ness, 48, 50-1, 57-8, 62, 84, 110-1, 117-8, 124, 127, 172, 184-5 Tusa, John, 220n, 224n Türk Yurdu journal, 212n, 217n ‘unbound seriality' (Anderson), 42 Uran, Handan, 217n USA, 26-7, 159, 183, 218n, 231n radio broadcasting, 22, 67, 74, 90, 111, 225n Uzel, Rüfltü, 68 Ülken, Hilmi Ziya, 59, 211n Ülkü journal, 215n, 227n Üngör, Zeki, 87 Venn, Couze, 5 Verges, Françoise, 6 visual, 102, 163, 230n, 231n, 232n ‘vulgarisation’, 136-7, 143, 148 ‘the waiting room of history’ (Tunaya), 38 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 180, 207n Walker, Andrew, 220n, 224n Weber, Max, 35, 188 Weidman, Amanda, 44 Western gaze, 5, 18, 26, 37-39, 50, 52, 55, 58, 60, 66, 80, 139, 153, 183-4, 189 hegemony, 6, 13, 37, 184-5, 187 historiography, 30

INDEX science, 10, 30, 141, 193, 208n, 235n technology, techniques, 7, 8, 10, 55, 57, 71, 79, 81, 153, 180, 193 values 6, 12, 235n Westernisation, 11-3, 16, 27, 35, 37, 49, 52-7, 60, 69, 80-2, 171, 186, 191, 210n, 227n Westernism, 5, 7, 41, 55, 57, 143, 167, 185; See also Occidentalism Williams, Raymond, 22 woman, 129, 130, 140-4, 152, 155-6, 160, 167-8, 176, 193, 229n womanhood, 139, 142, 176, 178 World War I, 62, 214n World War II, 3, 61, 90-91, 93, 94, 124, 167, 212n

271

Ye¤en, Mesut, 199n, 213n Yeni Adam journal, 49, 75, 77, 194, 210n, 212n, 215n, 216n, 217n, 218n, 219n, 225n, 226n, 231n, 237n youth, 20, 87, 130-2, 143, 145-9, 160, 170, 191 Yurchak, Alexei, 201n, 206n, 225n Yuval-Davis, Nira, 130 Yücel, Hasan Ali, 219n Yüceses, Hamiyet, 73 Zizek, Slavoj, 48, 50-3, 66, 80, 117, 137, 207n, 210n, 226n ‘non-knowledge’ 24, 43, 51-3 ‘virtual viewpoint of the Ego-ideal’ 51, 53, 80.