EUME
2020/ 2021

Yektan Türkyilmaz

Historiography, Popular Culture and Routes of Authoritarianism

Previous Fellowships: 2019/ 2020, 2018/ 2019, 2017/ 2018, 2014/ 2015

received his PhD from Duke University’s Department of Cultural Anthropology. He has taught courses at the Universities of Cyprus, Sabancı, Bilgi, Duke and at the California State Universities addressing debates around the notions of collective violence, memory making and reconciliation, and the politics of music. He is working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, Rethinking Genocide: Violence and Victimhood in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1915, that addresses the conflict in Eastern Anatolia in the early 20th century and the memory politics surrounding it. He was a EUME Fellow in 2014/15 and returned as a EUME Fellow for the academic years 2017-21.

2018-2021

Historiography, Popular Culture and Routes of Authoritarianism

Yektan Türkyilmaz currently works on three interrelated projects that have emerged out of his PhD dissertation: the first traces the genealogies of historiographical threads on the Armenian Genocide. This project tries to critically reassess the representations of the Armenian Genocide in multiple languages and formats, namely, in scholarly and popular histories, in memoirs, in music, in visual arts as well as in literature. It follows up on a central concluding observation in his dissertation that the Armenian Genocide, seen as a process, had not only ended countless lives but also marked the beginnings of novel ideological formations that redefined the boundaries of communities and citizenship and has set an exemplary case for many other instances of collective violence in the broader region of the Middle East up to the present.

His second project addresses the emergence of the sound recording industry and its implications on the remaking of public space in the broader Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. Sound recording was a historical breakthrough on a par with the development of printing in the 15th century.
The emergence of the sound recording industry coincided with historical upheavals and transformations in the Middle East. The rapid spread of this new technology captured, distributed and connected the cultural heritage of the people in and around the Ottoman Empire as well as it contributed, ironically, to the circulation of nationalist identities and ideologies. The recordings included folk and classical music, comic monologues, satire, political drama, nationalist propaganda, and other genres. At the turn of the 20th century, 78-rounds-per-minute (78RPM) records appeared in the “Orient” almost simultaneously with their appearance in Europe. Within a decade, sound engineers from various companies swept the major cities of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Balkans and Asia to record performers for local markets. Gramophone records, recorded locally yet pressed in Europe, swiftly became a major commodity in global trade and consumption. They were played in homes, coffee shops and meyhanes (a traditional restaurant/bar in Turkey and the Balkans). This new commodity had bearings beyond its merchandise value; it reshaped music, public culture, politics and economy at local, national and global scales. This project seeks to analyze the networks of production and consumption in view of emerging developments of nationalism, globalization and the production of cultural forms.  

Finally, Türkyilmaz’ third and most recent research topic addresses the ongoing political upheavals in Turkey. Putting the country’s turbulent history in relation with the recent radical transformations in capitalism and governmentality at the global scale this project tackles the making of popular authoritarianism, institutional disintegration and their implications in the realm of popular culture.
 

2017/ 2018

Roots and Routes of a Catastrophe: The Context and Afterlife of the Armenian Genocide (1915-2015)

Türkyilmaz’s current project traces the genealogies of historiographical threads on the Armenian Genocide. Such a research involves a critical reassessment of the representations of the Armenian Genocide in multiple languages and formats, namely, in scholarly and popular histories, in memoirs, in visual arts as well as in literature and music. This project is inspired by two major concluding observations in his previous research. The first one is about how the Armenian Genocide as a process, ironically, has served as a ‘creative’ and generative reference that helped foster novel ideological formations redefining boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Particularly crucial in this trajectory is that the Armenian Genocide sets an exemplary case for many other instances of collective violence in the broader region of the Middle East. Further, it marked the emergence of ongoing tensions in the region between authoritarian secularism and Islamist models for modernization, between predatory ethno-nationalist or exclusionary religious movements that advocate social/demographic purity, and advocates pluralist cultural traditions.
Emergent threads in historiography have not simply reflected new faces of these tensions but also have turned into a major force in redefining the terms of these controversies. Along those lines, Türkyilmaz’s second and consequent observation is that what we observe today in the countries that emerged from the Ottoman Empire is indeed a dynamic and renewed and not simply a stagnant and ancient conflict. Unlike currently available works on the historiography of the conflict, this project seeks to go beyond methodological nationalisms or the fetishisation of particular archives. Rather than focusing on one thread of narrative construction in isolation, Türkyilmaz proposes to put these threads of historical writings and cultural productions in dialogue as well as locating them in their local, regional and broader global contexts. He suggests that it is within these geo-political and historical scales that these historiographical traditions were formulated, and simultaneously challenged and co-constructed each other.

2014/ 2015

Urbicide in Van: Destruction and Cultural Death of an Ottoman City

Yektan Türkyilmaz’s research as a EUME Fellow revisits the most controversial site of the Armenian genocide, the province of Van between April and August 1915, and explores the political agendas and militaristic/strategic decisions that led to the total destruction of this historic Ottoman city. Van was the epicenter of the Armenian genocide, the place where it incubated. Paradoxically, however, genocide as such did not occur in the city/province; as the entire power structure in Van swiftly and radically changed hands between rival empires multiple times in a matter of a few months. Van in 1915 was a distinctive space within the larger devastating landscape of the Armenian genocide, one where myriad experiences, agendas, and actors clashed without any single dynamic or force establishing its unquestioned hegemony. Yet the city Van was the site and victim of an urbicide par excellence. All parties involved in the process targeted the city Van—its infrastructure, residential areas, government buildings, market place, military buildings, communication facilities, and foreign missions. Drawing on Armenian, Ottoman and Russian archival documents, periodicals, memoirs, photographic and cartographic materials and secondary sources his research investigates the ideological/symbolic and militaristic/strategic decisions that led to urbicide in Van and the continuing memory politics around it.