Imagining an Alternative Turkey:

Political Performativity, Counter-Memory, Mobilizing Publics

Call for Proposals

Editors: Deniz Başar, Eylem Ejder and Pieter Verstraete

Turkey underwent a transformation of the public sphere that radically reshaped the political
performativities and aesthetics of performance in the past decade, and so did the broader
institutional culture and society. The question that animates this volume is how can we examine
and formulate these entanglements of aesthetic, cultural, and societal changes? This is why the
contributions we seek for this volume sit at the crossroads of theatre and performance studies,
political sociology (with a specific focus on globalization and exile), policy and cultural analysis,
including wider frames of decolonization, Kurdish and Turkish (language) studies,
communication and translation studies, memory studies, dramaturgy, cultural leadership, and
democracy studies.

The focus of this volume is the period after the 2010s, which begun with the 2010 constitutional
referendum, the 2012-2015 Peace Process with the PKK, the Gezi Park Resistance in 2013, the
mass-scale election fraud controversies that started in 2014, and the potentials that the 2015
elections held. In the second half of the decade a long string of public bombings started with the
Suruç bombing in 2015 and continued to 2018, and the period was marked with the 2016
military coup attempt and its ensuing state of emergency period from 2016 to 2018. During the
state of emergency another constitutional referendum took place in 2017, as well as the mass
exile of academics, civil servants, journalists, and artists due to government decrees targeting
them. The decade ended with the Covid-19 global pandemic. All of these events influenced
public emotions, shifting from hope to disappointment, from a sense of agency to defeatism.
Under the influence of such socio-political transformations that shape Turkey both culturally and
politically today as well as restructure the public and private fields of emotion, this volume asks
how we can suggest new theoretical readings and terms, while counteracting attempts to
collectively forget/displace memories or overwrite the multifaceted performative acts that the
2010s set in motion.

The international image of Turkey has been cluttered over the past decade through its
authoritarianism, inherently dismissing the fact that there are thousands of people resisting as
well as working towards a more democratic Turkey, and millions who stand in solidarity with
them. These cultural acts of resistance and solidarity are unexpectedly playful and joyful.
Therefore, this volume aims to be one of the first structured analyses of how public emotions are
embodied in Turkey throughout the past decade over the political divides.

1
Our aim is to offer a critical framework that looks at the representations and embodiments of the
paradigm shifts in what constructs the public sphere, how remembering becomes a way of
challenging the official narratives and scenarios of hegemony, and how the mass amnesia
triggered by layers of the collective trauma caused a major transition in the socio-cultural field
from a performative point of view.

We envision structuring the book – possibly with two or three essays per section, creating
internal dialogue – along five themes:

1) Political Performativity: This theme covers performative protest (art as dissent, activism as
performance) vs. new tendencies in performing arts; performativity/theatricality of State; use of
social media in shaping images of Turkey abroad.

Questions under this theme are:

How can we understand performativity as a ‘structure of feeling’? What are the forms of
performative protests in Turkey and what is their relationship to their counterparts
abroad? What defines art as dissent or activism as performance?Which themes are
explored more in performance in relation to the shifting public emotions in Turkey? How
did left-leaning theatre in Turkey shifted from a post-Brechtian political theatre scene in
the 2000's to different forms of social theater? How do artists respond to the demand and
fatigue of politics, expose their own vulnerability in this environment, also vis-a-vis their
polarized audiences?

2) Counter-Commemorative Landscapes: This theme explores the acts of collective or

communal remembering, the artistic documentation of memories that challenge the official
(state) narratives in Turkey, and the function of commemorative landscapes in Turkey’s
multicultural history to counter-act willful acts of forgetting.

Questions under this theme are:

What does it mean to publicly remember against official state narratives and scenarios?
What is the role of performance and ‘repertoire’ in Turkey in keeping an (embodied)
memory, post-memory, or healing from trauma? What are alternative/aesthetic forms of
remembering and/or re-enacting the past? What are the public and private feelings that
guide artists into engaging with performance historiography or the ‘archive’ in their
contemporary works of performance?

3) Queering the Public Sphere: This theme looks into counterpublics, sur/sousveillance,
cosmopolitanism, dramaturgies for circumventing censorship, how cultural centers shift in urban
space due to political pressures, global perspectives on the right to urban and public space within
the context of Turkey.

2
Questions under this theme are:
What are the similarities, intersections, overlaps between artistic productions and activist
performances in Turkey after the 2010s? What are the tangible influences of artistic
works on Gezi, possibly in dialogue with the Occupy Movement, Arab Spring, Umbrella
Revolution etc.? How does the LGBTIQ movement in Turkey challenge the
heteronormative public sphere and through which artistic channels? How can we analyze
the themes of exile and migration that emerged in Turkey’s performing arts field? How
do live-streamed performances in the post-Covid-19 period pose alternatives to
hegemonic viewpoints and the control of public space?

4) Political Subjectivities in Dialogue: This theme questions the role of exile and diaspora in
Europe, Kurdish cultural politics in a transnational space, (self-)representations of cultural and
ethnic minorities in Turkey, and representation of women and LGBTIQ individuals in the arts
and in political dissent.

Questions under this theme are:

How do exile and diaspora define a nomadic performativity for Kurdish and/or Turkish
cultural politics in a transnational space? How are minorities and women in Turkey
represented in the arts and in political dissent? How can we trace performative
genealogies from the 2017 purge of academics, from the formation of Solidarity
Academies in Turkey to the Off-University initiatives of exiled academics in Berlin, and
continued to the 2021 Boğaziçi resistance?

5) Dramaturgies of Neoliberalism, Precarization, Solidarity: This theme mediates on the

openness for more collaborative and participatory forms of art, networks of solidarity and
emerging orientations around ecological concerns, the political awareness and sensibilities of a
new generation of upcoming artists, and young talent without funding creating art through their
own means of solidarity. Under this title we also seek contributions about experiments or
challenges in new organizational forms, either inside, outside and against institutions.

Questions under this theme are:

In the face of new populism and neoliberalism what kinds of (new) dramaturgies have
been developing as a tactic of resistance? How does the change of experience under
economic, social and political precarization echo in new performance works? How does
a climate of privatization affect Turkey’s cultural institutions and how does it influence
new ways of self-organizing in the arts?

3
In order to make the dialogue possible around this publication, we are planning a two-day online
conference setting in March 2022, kindly facilitated by the ICOG Centre of the University of
Groningen (The Netherlands) and the Free University Berlin (Germany), where we can present
our first drafts, while learning from each other in an international scholarly environment.
We foresee the book to come out by Spring 2023. We are currently in discussion with Palgrave
Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society.

Please send us an email by 28 May 2021 expressing your interest with an abstract (300-500
words), title of your paper and a short bio (max 100 words) by including all three editors of the
volume: Pieter Verstraete (p.m.g.verstraete@rug.nl), Eylem Ejder (eylemejder@gmail.com) and
Deniz Başar (denizbasar89@gmail.com).

REFERENCES
Akıncı, Eylül Fidan. “Sacred Children, Accursed Mothers: Performativities of Necropolitics and Mourning in
Neoliberal Turkey.” In Performance in a Militarized Culture, ed. by Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan.
London: Routledge, 2018.
Aktas, Vezir, Marco Nilsson, Klas Borell, and Roland S. Persson. “Taking to the Streets: A Study of the Street
Academy in Ankara.” British Journal of Educational Studies 63, no. 3 (2020): 365-88.
Albakry, Mohammed, and Rebekah Maggor, eds. Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution. London:
Seagull Books, 2016.
Bakiner, Onur. “Is Turkey Coming to Terms with Its Past? Politics of Memory and Majoritarian Conservatism.”
Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 41, no. 5 (2013): 691-708. Accessed April
29, 2013. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00905992.2013.770732.
Başar, Deniz. “Intimate Enemies and Geographies of Betrayal: Representation of the Impact of Kurdish-Turkish
War in Micropolitics of Daily Life.” In Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race, ed. by Tiziana Morosetti
and Osita Okagbue. Basingstoke: Springer Nature, 2021.
Baser, Bahar. “Gezi Spirit in the Diaspora Diffusion of Turkish Politics to Europe.” In Everywhere Taksim: Sowing
the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi, ed. by Isabel David and Kumru F. Toktamış. Amsterdam: AUP, 2015:
251-66.
Bax, Sander, Pascal Gielen, and Bram Ieven, eds. Interrupting the City: Artistic Constitutions of the Public Sphere.
Amsterdam: Valiz, 2015.
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.
Butler, Judith. Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2018.
Cinar, Alev. “Globalism as the Product of Nationalism: Founding Ideology and the Erasure of the Local in Turkey.”
Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 4 (2010): 90-118. Accessed Dec. 28, 2020.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0263276410372236.
Çelik, Duygu. “The Impact of the Dengbêjî Tradition on Kurdish Theater in Turkey.” In Kurdish Art and Identity -
Verbal Art, Self-Definition and Recent History, edited by Alireza Korangy, 96-118. N.p.: De Gruyter, 2020.
Cvejic, Bojana, and Ana Vujanovic. Public Sphere by Performance. Berlin: b_books & Les Laboratoires
d'Aubervilliers, 2015.
della Porta, Donatella, ed. Global Diffusion of Protest: Riding the Protest Wave in the Neoliberal Crisis.
Amsterdam: AUP, 2017 (= Protest and Social Movements).
Eğrikavuk, Işıl. “Maybe, We Will Benefit from Our Neighbour’s Good Fortune: An Exhibition on Collectivity,
Community, and Dialogue in Turkey.” In The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and

4
 Communication, ed. by Aidan McGarry, Itir Erhart, Hande Eslen-Ziya, Olu Jenzen, and Umut Korkut.
Amsterdam: AUP, 2020.
Ejder, Eylem. “The Contrasting Landscape of Theatre in Turkey: Resisting (with) Theatre.” The IATC journal/Revue
de l'AICT 17 (June 2018). Accessed Sept. 16, 2020. http://www.critical-stages.org/17/the-contrasting-
landscape-of-theatre-in-turkey-resisting-with-theatre.
Fişek, Emine. “Palimpsests of Violence: Urban Dispossession and Political Theatre in Istanbul.” Comparative
Drama 52, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 349-371. Accessed July 28, 2019.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol52/iss3/7.
Gambetti, Zeynep. “Risking Oneself and One’s Identity: Agonism Revisited.” In Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. by
Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016.
Giroux, Henry A. The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking beyond America's Disimagination Machine. San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014.
Güçbilmez, Beliz. Zaman/Zemin/Zuhûr: Gerçekçi Türk Tiyatrosunda Minyatür Kurgusu. Ankara: Deniz Kitabevi,
2006.
Kara, Onur Eylül. Yapabileceğimizi Yapmak: Minör Siyaset ve Türkiye Örneği. Istanbul: İletişim, 2019 (= İletişim
Yayınları 2772, Araştırma-İnceleme Dizisi 191).
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis, Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Ozbay, Cenk, Maral Erol, Aysecan Terzioglu, and Z. Umut Turem, eds. The Making of Neoliberal Turkey. London:
Routledge, 2016.
Özdüzen, Özge. “Spaces of Hope in Authoritarian Turkey: Istanbul’s Interconnected Geographies of Post-Occupy
Activism.” Political Geography 70 (April 2019): 34-43. Accessed March 27, 2021.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629818300271.
Öztürkmen, Arzu. “The Park, the Penguin, and the Gas: Performance in Progress in Gezi Park.” The Drama Review
58, no. 3 (2014): 39-68.
Özyurek, Esra. Introduction to Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey: Conversations on Democratic and Social
Challenges, ed. by Esra Ozturek, Gaye Ozpinar, and Emrah Altindis, 1-8. Cham, Switzerland: Springer,
2019.
Rolnik, Suely. “The Spheres of Insurrection: Suggestions for Combating the Pimping of Life.” E-Flux, Nov. 2017.
Accessed Sept. 12, 2020.
Şeyben, Burcu Yasemin. “‘My Life Has Become More Absurd Than My Play’: Mi Minör and the Crackdown on
Artistic Freedom in Turkey.” TDR/The Drama Review 63, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 36-49.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, DC: Duke
University Press, 2003.
Temelkuran, Ece. How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. New Delhi Central Delhi:
Fourth Estate LTD, 2019.
Tüfekçi, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven: Yale UP,
2017.
Verstraete, Pieter. “In Search of a New Performativity after Gezi: On Symbolic Politics and New Dramaturgies in
Turkey.” Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (Oct. 2019): 273-90.
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965 (orig.1961).
Yel, Ali Murat and Alparslan Nas. “After Gezi: Moving towards Post-Hegemonic Imagination in Turkey.” Insight
Turkey 15, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 177-90. Accessed March 27, 2021.
https://www.insightturkey.com/file/409/after-gezi-moving-towards-post-hegemonic-imagination-in-turkey-
fall-2013-vol15-no4.
Yilmaz, Zafer. “Revising the Culture of Political Protest after the Gezi Uprising in Turkey: Radical Imagination,
Affirmative Resistance, and the New Politics of Desire and Dignity.” Mediterranean Quarterly 29, no. 3
(Sept. 2018): 55-77. Accessed Sept. 17, 2018. https://read.dukeupress.edu/mediterranean-quarterly/article-
pdf/29/3/55/541586/0290055.pdf.