The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey by Perin E. Gürel (review)

Perin E Gürel’s, The Limits of Westernization, provides an engaging introduction to the cross-cultural history of Turkey and the United States. The author offers a novel approach based on combining “transnational American studies, with its focus on the movement of people, and ideas across nation-state boundaries, with comparative cultural studies” (p. 9), to understand and explain the trajectory of modernization in Turkey. The book engages with two sets of academic literature: What could be called post-orientalist cultural history, and gender-studies with a focus on the Turkish polity.

The author’s main argument is that as connections between Turkey and the US increased over the course of the twentieth century, “connectivity” gave way to (unforeseen) discourses of cultural politics at odds with “both the Turkish state’s authoritarian projects of westernization and U.S. figurations of Turkey” (p. 14). The book is structured episodically in two parts,“Over-Westernization” and “Under-Westernization”. The former begins with an analysis of how the US-Turkey relationship and perceptions of public and elite opinion in each country of the other unfolded during the 1920s. The main argument of chapter one is that the “Kemalist narratives” sought to portray dissidents such as Halide Edip Adıvar as being “westoxicated,” while creating a new citizenry that aimed “to counter stereotypes in the West” such as the “Terrible Turk,” popular in the American imagination (p. 55). Chapter two focuses on allegories of the US in Turkish novels, spanning from Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu and Peyami Safa, to Fakir Baykurt during the Cold War era, and Orhan Pamuk in 1990s. Its main argument is that novels as “semi-official historical commentaries” exceeded, challenged, and deconstructed the authoritarian selective westernization of Turkish and American officialdom (p. 99). “Under-Westernization” starts with the third chapter, which analyzes the vernaculars in both spoken, written and online jokes and their usage of the US as a narrative object. The main argument of the chapter is that hybrid jokes in “Turklish” are at odds with “the official U.S.-Turkish Alliance”. Demonstrating proper modernity by using English, while at the same time showing “a folksy rebellion against America and her local allies” in the vernacular of humor, provide both a challenge and reinforcement of certain hierarchies (pp. 145–146). The final chapter, arguably more contemporary in its subject matter, presents research on the gender categories within Turkey. This last chapter focuses on the classifications of trans-individuals in relation to larger LGBTI+ movement in Turkey. The main point of this chapter is emerging identities of westernized “gey”, and under-westernized “travesti” are at odds. The author argues that discourses revolving around such designations “code power relations through gender and sexuality, connect culture to the politics” (p. 186).

I found the comparative aspect of the author’s research to be its most valuable achievement. The comparison of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Woodrow Wilson’s respective amnesias (and Chapter 2’s literary comparisons to a lesser extent) is a definite highlight of The Limits of Westernization, as it shows multi-polity comparative perspectives are applicable and relevant in cultural studies as a methodological perspective. I think the introduction of the comparative perspective to the literature is an immensely important contribution of the author. However, I missed details of Halide Edip Adıvar’s “forgetfulness” (p. 24) in the comparison, as Y. Hakan Erdem in Tarih-Lenk (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2008) detailed extensively how Halide Edip Adıvar systematically “forgot” certain parts of Turkish Ordeal it its first Turkish publication. I think an addition to the comparison would add much more depth to the discussion of the “official history” in the respective chapter. Another highlight is author’s multi-disciplinary and intertextual approach to the issue of how to conceptualize “westernization” (pp. 9–10) to show that “it operates at the intersection of transnational contact and international...