Sex/Religion/Protest in Turkey

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course is designed to approach contemporary Turkish culture through a variety of sources: ethnographic, literary, cinematic, ethnomusicological, historical, architectural, and critical. The study of modernities will begin with late Ottoman fashions and move through the establishment of a republican national culture with its own modernist styles and philosophies. Readings from the Turkish internationalist communist poet Nazim Hikmet, “village novelist” Yasar Kemal, and political satirist Aziz Nesin will be examined in the larger Cold War context of American influence, Turkish nationalism and militarism. Ethnographic sources on the movement of villagers to the cities and ethnomusicological studies of the cultural movement called “Arabesk” will lead up to an examination of the fracturing and fragmenting of modernist discourses into post-modern multiplicities of ethnic and gender identities, literary and cinematic possibilities, and critical trends such as human rights activism, conscientious objection, Islamist feminism, and environmentalism.