Interlayering the marginalized: remembering Turkey's founding in contemporary narratives in Turkey and France

This dissertation studies a set of contemporary creative narratives across different media in Turkish or French: Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s films Bulutları Beklerken (2004) and Güneşe Yolculuk (1999); Haydar Karataş’ short stories “Ejma’nın Rüyası,” “Masal Bitti O Gece” and “Aşk Bitiyor da Hikayesi Bitmiyor” from Ejma’nın Rüyası (2017); Farid Boudjellal’s graphic narratives Petit Polio (1999) and Mémé d’Arménie (2002); and Sema Kılıçkaya’s novels Le royaume sans racines (2013) and La langue de personne (2018). These stories are all set in either Turkey or France in the late twentieth through early twenty-first century, but also incorporate references to the cultural assimilation and ethnic cleansings that took place during the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish nation-state during the 1910s through 1930s. The stories interweave mentions of these Ottoman-Turkish pasts with other historical and present instances of state violence and policies of assimilation in Turkey or France, thus performing transhistorical and transnational comparisons. They do so by relying on a set of formal techniques I refer to as “interlayering,” as well as on Michael Rothberg’s theory of “multidirectional memory,” which describes how disparate collective memories emerge in dialogue rather than in competition with each other. I argue that this corpus of works draws on the history of Turkey’s founding to foreground the way in which the emerging Turkish nation-state identified certain ethno-religious groups as “threatening” to the “vulnerable” nation-state, thus justifying their violence against and marginalization of these groups. Ustaoğlu’s, Karataş’, Boudjellal’s, and Kılıçkaya’s respective narratives juxtapose these elements of Turkey’s founding with later historical contexts to show how these other events are also defined by similar socio-political dynamics. My project builds on existing scholarship that proposes that works of literature and cinema that retell Turkey’s contested pasts can speak back to state-sponsored versions of history. I suggest that the works in this corpus challenge state discourse in a way beyond just narrating history from the perspective of victims: they show how different historical instances in which the state deemed internal cultural difference a threat are not exceptional cases, but rather symptomatic of the relationship between the Turkish and French nation-states and their inhabitants. This set of stories also suggest that recognizing and contesting these transhistorically and transnationally occurring patterns can help work towards a pluralist vision of national community.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Comparative Literature

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Baytas, Claire

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mathy, Jean-Philippe
• Basci, Pelin
• Calderwood, Eric
• Kaplan, Brett

• Turkey
• France
• Memory
• Migration
• State Violence
• Nationhood
• Literature
• Cinema
• Graphic Narratives

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Claire Baytas

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120380

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F120380