New Books in Turkish Studies

New Books Network
New Books in Turkish Studies

Interviews with authors about new books in Turkish and Ottoman Studies.

  1. HACE 1 DÍA

    Emine Ö Evered, "Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity" (U Texas Press, 2024)

    Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates. Evered's account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    56 min
  2. 22/12/2024

    Serkan Görkemli, "Sweet Tooth and Other Stories" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)

    Queerness, labels, and allyship are central themes in this moving collection of stories set in Turkey, where Middle Eastern and Euro-American expressions of identity collide and naming one's orientation is a fraught endeavor. An eleven-year-old undergoes hand surgery that will allow him to wear a wedding ring in adulthood. Two college roommates reach an erotic understanding as they indulge in dessert. A sex worker travels with an American same-sex marriage activist through the Aegean countryside. A passionate hookup during Istanbul Pride ends in tear gas. Two friends' tempers flare over cold red wine on a hot summer night by the Dardanelles. A father bonds with his son and his son's drag-queen boyfriend over classic Turkish cinema on the Mediterranean coast. In Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (UP of Kentucky, 2024), Serkan Görkemli weaves together interconnected narratives of four Turkish characters—Hasan, Gökhan, Nazlı, and Cenk—who search for clarity, love, and acceptance amid social change. Set in a rich mixture of urban and rural locales, the stories take place from the 1980s through the 2010s against the backdrop of Turkey's transition from military-backed secularism to the rise of the religious right, local and global media representations of queer individuals and culture, and the emergence of affirming LGBTQ+ identities. Görkemli creates a complex, engaging network of plots about his characters' struggles and triumphs in navigating families, communities, and themselves. Braving discrimination, they strive to embrace their identities and find joy, solace, and approval within a society that marginalizes who they are and how they love. Serkan Görkemli (he/him) is the author of two books: Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky) and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press; winner of the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Book Award presented by the Conference on College Composition and Communication). His creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Image; his fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Joyland, Foglifter, and Chelsea Station. He was a 2023-24 faculty fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, a contributor in fiction at the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a fiction fellow at the 2018 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat. Originally from Türkiye, he has a PhD in English from Purdue University and is an associate professor of English at UConn Stamford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1 h y 9 min
  3. 24/11/2024

    Infrastructure, Development, and Racialization

    International development projects supported by governments of wealthy countries, international financial institutions, and influential NGOs like the Gates Foundation purport to uplift poor or disadvantaged populations through political, economic, and social interventions in these communities. However, practices, policies, and discourses of development also have a darker side: they are both premised on and perpetuate the translation of social difference into deficit, ranking groups according to their perceived ‘stage’ of historical development. My guest today, the political theorist Begüm Adalet, has explored how discourses and practices of development have interacted with political processes of racialization. She also examines how anti-colonial movements can resist racialized development practices by envisioning alternative means of recrafting built environments and the creation of selves. Our interview today focuses on three recent articles that she has published in academic journals: “Agricultural infrastructures: Land, race, and statecraft in Turkey,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space vol. 40, no. 6 (2022): 975-993 “Infrastructures of Decolonization: Scales of Worldmaking in the Writings of Frantz Fanon,” Political Theory vol. 50, no. 1 (2022): 5-31 “An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective,” American Political Science Review (2024) Begüm Adalet is assistant professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Hotels and Highways: The construction of modernization theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford, 2018), which I interviewed her about for the New Books Network in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1 h y 20 min

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Interviews with authors about new books in Turkish and Ottoman Studies.

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