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Metis Nonfiction
Sociology and Social Theory
13 x 19.5 cm, 376 pp
ISBN No. 975-342-517-1
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Prints:
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1st Print: April 2005
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Download high resolution copy
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About the Author
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Meltem Ahıska was born in 1958 in Ankara. She studied sociology at Bosphorus University
in Istanbul. After receiving her MA degree in communication studies at the University
of Westminster, she completed her PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths College, University
of London in 2000. Her articles, essays and poems have appeared in various journals
including Toplum ve Bilim, New Perspectives on Turkey and South Atlantic
Quarterly and she was a member of the editorial board of Defter,
a journal of cultural criticism published in Turkey from 1987-2002. She has published
a book of poems, Havalandırma (2002), and curated several exhibitions, the
most recent being "Aradığınız Kişiye Şu An Ulaşılamıyor: Türkiye’de Hayat Tarzı
Temsilleri, 1980-2005" ("The Person You Are Calling Cannot Be Reached at the Moment:
Representations of Lifestyle in Turkey, 1980-2005"). Meltem Ahıska is currently
an associate professor of sociology in Bosphorus University.
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Other Books from Metis
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Havalandırma, 2002
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Meltem Ahıska
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Occidentalism in Turkey
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Questions of Modernity and National Identity in Turkish Radio Broadcasting
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Radyonun Sihirli Kapısı
Garbiyatçılık ve Politik Öznellik
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Rights sold:
English: IB Tauris
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Contents
Reviews
Excerpt
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Occidentalism in Turkey is a study that focuses on radio broadcasting in
Turkey during its first decades, namely from 1927 until the end of the 1940s. But
it is not only that. It is also a groundbreaking contribution to discussions around
nation-building and modernity in non-Western contexts. Ahıska coins and works with
the analytic concept of Occidentalism as a framework for describing the set of practices
and arrangements justified in and against the imagined idea of "the West" in the
non-West. Hence she contests the dualisms that infiltrate virtually all studies
of non-Western nation-building processes – dualisms such as East/West, modern/traditional
and model/copy. She considers these to be symptoms of Occidentalism and offers in
their stead a much more complex theoretical framework that takes into account the
problems on the very boundary of the historical East-West divide. Considering the
role of technology in imagining the nation, the focus of this study, namely radio
broadcasting in a crucial era of Turkish nationalism, opens up a rich terrain out
of which Ahıska spins an engaging narrative.
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Acknowledgements
Introduction – Nationalism, Space and Time: The Early Years of Radio
Occidentalism: History and Theory
The Studio and "The Voice of the Nation"
London Calling Turkey
Radio Talks: Be Joyful, Stay Young!
Radio Dramas: Women and Men
Conclusion – Occidentalism Today
Appendix: Parliamentary Debate Concerning Radio (1945)
Bibliography
Index
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Zafer Yenal, Virgül, July-August 2005
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"In her book, Ahıska draws attention to the different kinds of subjectivities and
their fragmentations, divisions, excesses and shortages that emerge in the process
of creating a pure ‘national voice’. She shows that this process is not merely a
matter of ‘fiction,’ ‘construction’ or ‘project’. Her analyses and discussions,
especially in the chapters entitled ‘The Studio’, ‘Radio Talks’ and ‘Radio Dramas’,
point to the fluctuations, vicissitudes and contingencies involved in this process,
reminding us the extent to which the process is rife with politics and struggle.
That is, the emergence and diffusion of a ‘national voice’ does not follow a unilinear
path from West to East, or from above to below, but rather takes place in its own
discordant history and historicity. Drawing attention to the centrality of Occidentalism
as a discourse of power in understanding this very historicity, Occidentalism in
Turkey is a crucial and abiding contribution to the study of nationalism
and modernization."
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I utilize the concept of Occidentalism in a much more critical and broader perspective
than either meaning a loyal "Westernism" or a spiteful "anti-Westernism". Hence
Occidentalism does not only denote science and technology adopted from the West
or a mere affect of hatred or revolt against it, as usually associated with the
Middle East today. Occidentalism, in my perspective, points to both discursive and
non-discursive strategies and tactics the "Orientals" employ in order to answer
"the West". Hence Occidentalism is employed in this book to address both the desire
for and denigration of what is essentialized as "the West," and also the re-codification
and operationalization of a notion of "the West" within power relations in Turkey.
First of all, I argue that the production
and representation of the "knowledge of the Other" is not at all symmetrical in
Orientalisms and Occidentalisms. One must attend to the unevenness in power relations,
and consequently the definition and representation of the self and the other, and
the articulation of the discourses of history and modernity within them.
However, despite the obvious unevenness,
there is a shared "superaddressee," which avails an "understanding" between Orientalisms
and Occidentalisms. 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" is not "modernity"
but "national identity" in this frame: while the representation of modernity is
coined in a binary of modern/traditional, and produced within an apparent hierarchy
between the West and the East, it is the shared constitutive and justifying assumption
that national identity is the most tolerable form of community in the modern world.
Yet not all nations are equally modern; some, especially in the East are marked
as "different". I would argue that Occidentalism dialogically responds to this very
"difference" in a similar ambivalent manner. From the point of view of Turkish modernity,
Occidentalism is the outcome of the attempt to destroy the undesired difference
with "the West" in temporal terms by "catching up" with modernity, while maintaining
the desired difference as authenticity in its national space.
Longer sample manuscript available in English
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