KHAS CORE Talks – Güldeniz Kıbrıs
KHAS CORE Talks series continues with Güldeniz Kıbrıs’s speech entitled “Imperial Flashbacks in Cold War Turkey”.
You can follow the speech on Tuesday, December 7 at 20:00 on Zoom.
Abstract: Nation is imagined as attached to a homeland, the ‘sacred’ source of resources, livelihood, output, energy, and emotions. In modern societies where encounters with ‘others’ increase due to displacements, migrations, wars, and modernization; nationalist myths referring to collective memories of space gain strength in helping people counter ‘homelessness.’ This talk focuses on the legacy of collective imperialist memories on Turkish nationalist imagination and the conflation of ‘empire’ and ‘nation-state,’ through widely consumed historical/action/adventure movies of the 1960s-70s. This film genre was trendy in Turkish cinema when there was an interest in historical films in the world. Some of the most memorable and successful films featured comic-book heroes riding their horses in post-Ottoman spaces in the Cold War period. Although the Ottoman Empire died, its imprint on collective memory still survives, leading to the coexistence of nation-state ideology with visions of empire and so highly ambiguous, fluid, abstract, and indefinite mental geographical maps besides specific, impermeable, and static understanding of national borders. Thus, the talk looks at how these movies represent post-Ottoman identity concerning the representation of the ‘landscape.’ The talk, in the end, aims to grasp nationalistic imaginings of space and the complexity of simple construction of ‘national.’
Güldeniz Kıbrıs received her BA from Koç University International Relations, MA, from Modern History, Sabancı University. She has just submitted her Ph.D. dissertation at Leiden University, Department of History & Turkish Studies, about the reproduction of nationalist political myths in Cold War Turkey. Before joining Kadir Has University, she has worked in Koç, Sabancı, and Leiden Universities and taught about nationalism, political ideologies, history of Europe, Turkish politics, political culture, migration, history of modern Turkey, and the history of civilizations. Her research interests include nation-building in Turkey and Mediterranean Europe, history and politics of space, historical approaches to communication studies, history of everyday life, and historical approaches to law.
Please fill the registration form in advance:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvdeyqrjsvG9ZUPs_W9tdjxhQ29ssZWaN8