a note
We are having a rather splendid thunderstorm right now, the first proper one of the season: lightning flashes, rumbles in the distance, the gurgle of water pouring through the streets. I'm enjoying it immensely (partly because I hustled back from from the co-op with my groceries just as the first rain was starting to fall). Did you know that English has a word for that wonderful tangy-mineral smell of rain that falls on dry earth? It's petrichor.
I'm in the middle of trying to write simultaneously several longish things that may or may not appear here, and consequently getting none of them done. Check back later. Or perhaps, since request-responsive blogging is what all the cool cats are doing now, I'll let you choose which I should prioritize:
a) the current political tension in Turkey (crisis over presidential selection, military interference in government, and the politics of the hijab, with bonus personal story about Abdullah Gül, his wife, his wife's headscarf, and one very irate engineering student).
b) past polemics from Martha Nussbaum and Joseph Massad, roughly coalescing around the moral & practical questions facing human rights advocacy in the content of cultural difference, with specific reference to feminism and queer rights issues in MENA, the Islamicate world, and India. Drawn from the session I chaired during our informal theory seminar, and with an eye to Massad's book launch next week.
c) hat-wearing and Kemalist nationalism in the Sanjak of Alexandretta, circa 1937 (bound to be a winner!) Recycled from thesis project, because I had the leave the hats out of the conference paper due to space constraints, and am sad about that.
d) the photographs of Ara Güler (since the last yearning-filled post of melancholy İstanbul images was so popular....)
e) New York foodways.
All of these will come sooner or later, though the year-old, still-unpublished drafts I just found in blogger--a review of Paradise Now, and an appraisal of the poet/playwright/actress Sarah Jones, among others--suggest "later" may mean, quite some time.
I'm in the middle of trying to write simultaneously several longish things that may or may not appear here, and consequently getting none of them done. Check back later. Or perhaps, since request-responsive blogging is what all the cool cats are doing now, I'll let you choose which I should prioritize:
a) the current political tension in Turkey (crisis over presidential selection, military interference in government, and the politics of the hijab, with bonus personal story about Abdullah Gül, his wife, his wife's headscarf, and one very irate engineering student).
b) past polemics from Martha Nussbaum and Joseph Massad, roughly coalescing around the moral & practical questions facing human rights advocacy in the content of cultural difference, with specific reference to feminism and queer rights issues in MENA, the Islamicate world, and India. Drawn from the session I chaired during our informal theory seminar, and with an eye to Massad's book launch next week.
c) hat-wearing and Kemalist nationalism in the Sanjak of Alexandretta, circa 1937 (bound to be a winner!) Recycled from thesis project, because I had the leave the hats out of the conference paper due to space constraints, and am sad about that.
d) the photographs of Ara Güler (since the last yearning-filled post of melancholy İstanbul images was so popular....)
e) New York foodways.
All of these will come sooner or later, though the year-old, still-unpublished drafts I just found in blogger--a review of Paradise Now, and an appraisal of the poet/playwright/actress Sarah Jones, among others--suggest "later" may mean, quite some time.
posted by kitabet at 10:24 PM
8 Comments:
erm. i'm teaching turkey this week. the hat please :)
I didn't know it was petrichor. And its absolutely my most favourite smell in the world.
Responsive blogging - I like all the options....how to choose? :(
I was just wondering this morning when listening to the news what you were thinking about the current political crisis in Turkey. Terribly hard to know what I think, when I have just about equal fears about the extremes of nationalism and of islamism. And Ara Guler, always, anytime... and perhaps particularly to remind us of the weird, unique beauty of a city whose name we keep hearing only in the context of crisis...
Hello, I'm Turkish and have been reading your blog with great interest for some time. I would love to read your thoughts on (a). I am especially curious about the irate engineering student :)
I'd definitely be interested in your take on the Turkish crisis. While I'm here, I'll also shamelessly advertise my take, not least because this is about the best place I can come for knowledgeable criticism.
buchu! why didn't you tell me that sooner??
sz: yes, though to be honest it wasn't dry enough here prior for it to be really strong
jean: welcome back to the internets! yes, Ara Guler will be blogged for sure. If only because one of his photos is pinned above my workdesk, and I don't go a day without seeing it.
alev: merhaba, hoşgeldiniz! Eskiden Istanbul'da bir "Alev"'le kaldim. mühendislik oğrencisi hakkında anlatacağım....
jonathan: funnily enough, i clicked over to your site earlier in the evening and thought, well, he's saved me half the trouble--I can just link to that and add some stories! I am mostly in accord with your assessment--though I'd disaggregate some of the forces/constituencies at work a little differently--and I am, if anything, even more deeply uneasy about the game Büyükanıt and the rest of the generals are playing. I am by no means a fan of the AKP, but I think the military and the forces it represent constitute a more troubling threat to an "open society" in Turkey.
Anyway, tomorrow I will follow this up, probably with a bit of a focus on the headscarf issue and the rifts it has come to represent in terms of symbolic politics.
The AKP bothers me about as much as the German Christian Democrats (and considerably less than the right-wing Catholic parties in Poland). It doesn't seem to have done a bad job running the country, and it has played strictly by constitutional rules. The ultra-nationalists scare me a lot more, because I've seen the kind of damage that they can do elsewhere (for instance, in Israeli terms, the AKP is Shas with free-market ideology while the Nationalist Movement is Yisrael Beiteinu or maybe even worse).
One thing I didn't say in my essay, but maybe should have, was that the Turkish crisis contains elements of religious conflict on more than one side. The army's Kemalist ideology isn't simply "secularist," but instead has elevated secular Turkishness into a virtual civic religion. This aspect of Kemalism may be responsible in part for things like Article 301 (which is essnetially a blasphemy law), the running sore of Kurdish policy and the military's reaction to even the mild public religious displays of AKP. There are some very deeply held beliefs at issue here and I don't see how an early election will resolve them.
I see a lot of votes for (a), may I opt for (b)? Not as topical, but just as interesting (to me)...
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