Istanbul 1940 And Global Modernity

This book revisits Erich Auerbach’s Istanbul writings as pioneering works of contemporary literary history and cultural criticism. It interprets these writings, which center around Western literary cultures, against the background of Auerbach’s Turkish colleagues’ works that trace Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural histories.

Written forms of Arabic composed during the era of the Ottoman Empire present an immensely fruitful linguistic topic. Extant texts display a proximity to the vernacular that cannot be encountered in any other surviving historical Arabic material, and thus provide unprecedented access to Arabic language history. This rich material remains very little explored. Traditionally, scholarship on Arabic has focussed overwhelmingly on the literature of the various Golden Ages between the 8th and 13th centuries, whereas texts from the 15th century onwards have often been viewed as corrupted and not worthy of study. The lack of interest in Ottoman Arabic culture and literacy left these sources almost completely neglected in university courses. This volume is the first linguistic work to focus exclusively on varieties of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Arabic in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th to the 20th centuries, and present Ottoman Arabic material in a didactic and easily accessible way. Split into a Handbook and a Reader section, the book provides a historical introduction to Ottoman literacy, translation studies, vernacularisation processes, language policy and linguistic pluralism. The second part contains excerpts from more than forty sources, edited and translated by a diverse network of scholars. The material presented includes a large number of yet unedited texts, such as Christian Arabic letters from the Prize Paper collections, mercantile correspondence and notebooks found in the Library of Gotha, and Garshuni texts from archives of Syriac patriarchs.

In its transition from 18th century capital of the Ottoman Empire to economic powerhouse of the Turkish Republic, the city of Istanbul has been transformed beyond recognition. After the establishment of the Republic, Turkey increasingly turned to the West for ideas about how to create, shape and direct the development of a modern culture. This desire was felt most strongly in Istanbul, Turkey's most populous city. Its status as the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and later the economic hub of Turkey, made Istanbul a forum for the different regimes to display their political, ideological and social policies in the context of the built environment. Some modernisation policies never came to fruition - such as the unsuccessful late nineteenth century attempt by young Ottoman bureaucrats to initiate planning reforms at a time when the Empire was on the verge of collapse. The new Turkish Republic at first neglected the old Ottoman capital, and later attempted to make it conform to its secular political ideology. After World War II, Istanbul entered a new era in modernisation, with the Democratic Party government conducting a large scale re-design of Istanbul's urban form in order to show Turkey as a major political and economic force in post-war Europe and the Middle East. The scale of this modernisation process mirrored the spectacular transformation of Paris a century before: thousands of buildings were demolished, boulevards were carved out within the old city, and whole new residential neighbourhoods were created. In telling the story of this dramatic transformation, Murat Gül investigates and traces the impact of these changing policies on the very fabric of the city itself - in its streets, buildings and landscapes - and in the process provides new insights into the history of Turkey.

Turkey's Enagement with Modernity explores how the country has been shaped in the image of the Kemalist project of nationalist modernity and how it has transformed, if erratically, into a democratic society where tensions between religion, state and society continue unabated.

In the first two decades after W.W.II, social scientist heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a 'modernizing' nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, healthy children in school uniforms, and downtown Ankara's modern architecture all proclaimed the country's success. Although Turkey's modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an explicit, elite-driven 'project of modernity' that took its inspiration exclusively from the West. The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning. As they examine both the Turkish project of modernity and its critics, the contributors offer a fresh, balanced understanding of dilemmas now facing not only Turkey but also many other parts of the Middle East and the world at large.

An ethnographic analysis of the ways that, during the 1990s, Turkish citizens began to express nostalgia for the secularist and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic.

Mid-Century Modernism in Turkey studies the unfolding of modern architecture in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s. The book brings together scholars who have carried out extensive research on post-WWII modernism in a global context. The authors situate Turkish architectural case studies within an international framework during this period, providing a close reading of how architectural culture responded to ubiquitous post-war ideas and ideals, and how it became intertwined with politics of modernization and urbanization. This book contributes to contemporary scholarship to reconsider post-war architecture, beyond canonical explanations.