Teaching Social Conflict in Turkish American Studies

Teaching American studies in Turkey involves hazards and opportunities for American scholars hopeful of internationalizing their perspective. The growth of the field in Turkey is one chapter in a history extending more than two hundred years from the adoption of Western-style education in the Turkish Republic and its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire (Davison 1990). Thus it is part of a process that Americans might readily think of as Westernization but that in fact is more complicated. On the one hand, support for American studies in Turkey has come in part from American and British institutions. In 1959 the Rockefeller Foundation donated money to establish the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at what is now Bosphorus University, and the history department there still calls on the American embassy to fund guest speakers. In the 1960s Peace Corps volunteers taught English language and literature in public high schools. Although Turkish faculty taught a few American texts, Americans teaching on Fulbright scholarships were the first specialists in American literature at Ankara and Haceteppe Universities when these universities began to establish the country's first American literature departments in the late 1960s (Aytür 1996). ⁹ On the other hand, Turkish government officials have initiated much of the support for Westernization in general and for the study of American and British cultures in particular (Davison 1988, 1990; Zürcher 1998; Raw 2000); the Turkish scholars to whom I have spoken do not have strictly ideological motivations for specializing in American literature or culture; and the American funds that helped stimulate Turkish study of American literature, history, and culture are drying up: the U.S. Information Agency has been folded into the U.S. State Department, and every year its funding of the Turkish American Studies Association Annual Meeting is cut a little more. Meanwhile, most active Turkish American studies researchers are interested in examining the problems rather than the "essence" of American culture and nationhood. In my department, we teach students about social conflict and injustice in or around the United States. Most of the department's members were trained in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, and most have adopted a model of culture as a "whole way of conflict" (Thompson 1995: 185). ¹⁰

The on-line academic catalog's description of the department in which I teach makes it look politically leftist and oppositional (American Culture and Literature 2000-2001). Faculty specialties are antiracist, feminist, or Marxist. In 1996 required courses had been added in the African American novel, ethnic writing and culture, cultural studies, women's studies, contemporary women's literature, critical theory, and American modernism. In 2000 the courses were reorganized to integrate race, society, and history across the curriculum. This change was motivated in part by faculty who questioned whether this model of culture as a whole way of conflict, and of American studies as a lens through which to focus on social injustice, was the most appropriate model for an American studies program at this university. Despite Turkish and foreign faculty's best intentions, this model often reinforced a passive attitude among most of the students. It allowed them to subscribe to the ideologically distorted "truth" of the distance between Turkish and American cultures and hence between themselves and the concepts, skills, and texts they were studying.

When I first arrived on campus in the fall of 1999, it struck me that when they learned about the conflict between loyalists and revolutionaries in the American Revolution, about the tension between farmers and urban dwellers during the late nineteenth century, or about minority criticism of the dominant literary tradition and second-wave feminists' campaign against sexual harassment in the workplace, my students acted as if analogous social conflicts did not exist in Turkey. Their comments in class suggested that education in the abstract, in any subject, following any methodology, could solve such problems and therefore that these problems did not limit the lives...