This presentation draws on Yektan Türkyılmaz’s new project that explores the impact of early recording technologies and the politics of music production across the broader Ottoman world, with particular emphasis on the post-imperial contest over the heritage of early music repertoires. It examines the vast, rhizomatic archive of commercial 78 RPM recordings to uncover the tensions and spatiotemporal dynamics among imperial, global, decolonial, and national imaginaries, intersecting at the crossroads of music, technology, the cultural marketplace, and heritage-making.
Through an archaeological investigation of production, circulation, and representation of 78 RPM shellac discs of the Eastern Mediterranean, Deviant Legacies traces the many lives and multiple uses of recorded repertoire in cultural wars up to the present. Rather than treating shellac records as dead media, this presentation engages with their genealogy and afterlives, emphasizing their enduring effects on today’s composite styles and genres, on faraway music scenes in diasporas, and on heritagization practices. Drawing on anthropology, sociology, history, political economy, ethnomusicology, and digital humanities, Deviant Legacies examines how policymakers, musicians, recording companies, archivists, and record collectors have used diverse strategies to claim, curate, preserve, interpret and perform the richly varied yet interwoven musical legacies of the Ottoman lands.
Yektan Türkyılmaz received his PhD from Duke University Department of Cultural Anthropology. He taught courses at Sabancı, Bilgi, Duke California State Universities and at the University of Cyprus, addressing the debates around the notions of collective violence, memory making and reconciliation, and politics of music. More recently, Yektan Türkyilmaz has been a visiting professor at the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Central European University. His new research project, Sounds Beyond Empire: Music, Technology, Heritage across the Mediterranean, addresses how the 78 RPM recordings by early phonographic industries in the Eastern Mediterranean continued to shape social, cultural and political imaginaries long after their initial production. In the academic years 2017-21, Yektan has been a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Diana Abbani is a cultural historian of the modern Middle East. She holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from Sorbonne University and was a EUME and Fritz Thyssen Fellow (2018-2023) at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her research focuses on the intersections of popular culture, social and political transformations, and the emergence of music and entertainment industries in Beirut and Bilad al-Sham. She has published extensively on Beirut’s cultural history and is currently preparing a book that explores alternative narratives in the region’s musical history, foregrounding the experiences of marginalized communities during periods of sonic transformation. She is currently the Science Communication Coordinator for the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.