The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey ed. by Esra Özyürek (review)

208 JOTSA 2:1 (2015) and events in a book renders these otherwise useful articles redundant and repetitive. Too many articles talk about the same milestones in the development of these nationalisms and offer very similar narratives, which gives the reader the feeling that the book could be half as long and still retain the same effect. H. Akın Ünver Kadir Has University Özyürek, Esra, ed. The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Vii + 225 pp. Cloth, $24.95: ISBN 0-81563131 -6. The Turkish Republic has a fraught relationship with time. Historical time especially has been the object of such sustained attention, concentration, and regulation—both by Kemalist nationalists and by critics of Kemalism—that it has become almost more than overdetermined. This relationship with time is not unique to Turkey. But there are very few nation states aside from Turkey whose histories have prompted not just scholarly debate, but acts of legislation, and not just locally, but on the part of parliaments of other countries. There is something particularly provocative about how time plays out in Turkey that causes consternation at best and terror at worst. The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey provides an effective blueprint for addressing time in the Turkish Republic. Esra Özyürek makes a convincing two-part case for this effort as she introduces the book. First, she argues that there has been a distinct change since the early 1990s in the way that Turkish citizens remember their past—that remembering has become a means of constructing multifaceted and multilayered, rather than uniform and flat, identities. Second, she argues that familiar theses positing an authoritarian, state-imposed “amnesia” in Turkey need to be replaced by more nuanced discussions of the ways in which memory has been “both productive and a product of political struggle in the present” (p. 7). The essays that follow Özyürek’s introduction each describe an act or performance of remembering and then discuss how these acts disrupt or reinforce a particular relationship to time. Moreover, unlike historians who are often averse to scrutinizing time beyond the occasional re-periodization, the contributors to this volume—anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of comparative literature—are unafraid to challenge many of the fundamental assumptions about temporal linearity, cause and effect, or testimony that underlie both historical memory and public memory. The result is a collection that begins to answer the question of why time should be so politically laden in the Turkish Republic. The collection consists of seven essays, not including Özyürek’s introduction. The first three are devoted to memory as it is situated in physical spaces and practices—archaeological sites, museums, and carpet weaving. The last four chapters address the memory of historic events, moments, and figures—the Greek- Book Reviews 209 Turkish population exchange, the 1915 Armenian massacres, and the life and death of Atatürk. Although this split between the first half of the book and the second is significant, all seven of the essays are nonetheless united by a number of running themes. Most important is the idea that public remembering in Turkey is far from the rational, uniform, and unifying activity that it (ideally) was (supposed to be) during the early Republican period. Each of the essays in different ways plays up both the irrational character of memory and also its destabilizing effects. Kimberly Hart’s discussion of the commodification of tradition in the realm of carpet weaving, for instance, relates well to Nazlı Ökten’s and Özyürek’s chapters on remembering Atatürk and the early Republican period. In the first, Hart describes carpet weavers’ complicated participation in modern Turkish nationalism—how their attempt to restrict any reference to traditional nomadic existence to carpets alone has been challenged by both urban Turkish and international consumers who insist that the weavers themselves also be traditional, authentic, nomadic, or uncontaminated by modernity. In the latter two, the political spaces marked out by Kemalist invocations of Atatürk are reconfigured by non-Kemalist or even antiKemalist groups, who choose to remember Atatürk in alternative ways. In all three, these seemingly stable symbols—the carpet and Atatürk—themselves...