Ten years later, the Gezi Park protests continue to shape Turkish politics.
Tag: Turkey
Literature: What to Make of Complicity?
Turkish literature shows how difficult it is to balance political critique with literary experimentation. But it can—and, perhaps, must—succeed.
Armenia: Another Century, Another Genocide?
From the start of Armenia’s independence in 1991, Turkey took a hostile position toward its erstwhile victim of genocide. That hostility remains.
Armenia and Azerbaijan: That Other War
The radical simplifications that flow from nationalism shrink the possibilities to understand the other.
Turkish Literature at Sea
The global literary market is a body of books in translation that, despite being from very disparate contexts, sound a lot like each other. Why?
James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere
How the United States terrorizes the rest of the world, Baldwin realized abroad, echoed how it terrorized its inhabitants at home.
B-Sides: Latife Tekin’s “Berji Kristin”
As in mythology, the characters in a 1984 Turkish novel are acted upon by forces distant and uncaring.
Turkey’s “Ghost Empire”
A Turkish academic I once met in a provincial Anatolian city insisted to me that Turkey is a country where a lot goes unsaid, a place where much is buried, and where fairy tales are told to hide a ...
Muslim Fashion Is Now Mainstream
Modest Fashion is having a moment. From London catwalks, which hosted the first branded “Modest Fashion Week” in February this year, to gyms and running ...
The Pasajlar of Tunalı Hilmi Çaddesi, Ankara
Bookended by Koçatepe Mosque and Kuğulu Park, Tunalı Hilmi Çaddesi is a leafy anomaly in a city that worships concrete ...
James Baldwin’s Istanbul
“Baby, I’m broke, I’m sick. I need your help,” James Baldwin said to a friend when he landed in Europe, looking for a place to rest. This time, his European city of choice wasn’t Paris. It was Istanbul. …
Turkey’s Progressive Past
In her posthumously published memoir, written in the late 1960s, the journalist Sabiha Sertel reflected on her life in exile from Turkey, her home country. She had lived through a period of ...
The Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Knowledge
In this centennial year since the Armenian Genocide, countless conferences, meetings, and commemorations are underway across the globe. While they have all been peaceful so far, they come at the end ...
Necessary Digressions
On July 2, 2014, Recip Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister of the Republic of Turkey since 2003, announced his candidacy for president. With this maneuver, worryingly similar to that of Vladimir Putin ...