the invention of hatay, part I: told formally
[the promised geekblogging at last--feedback from y'all historians & related ilk in the crowd especially appreciated]
In reaction to sepoy's manifesto, an email exchange with dear S. about 'storytelling' as a mode of academic exchange, and my own need to work out the substance of what I am going to say too bloody early in the morning on Saturday (why, may I ask, is the most jet-lagged participant scheduled to deliver her paper first?), here is the beginning of a stab at the polyglot approach to this project--a reluctant phoenix from the ashes of my MPhil thesis, currently incarnating as a contribution to the Oxford Symposium on (Trans)nationalism in the Mediterreanean. First I will tell the tale in formal academic-speak, with the abstract I sent the conference organizers a couple of months ago:
The Invention of Hatay: Nationalism, Minorities, and Colonial Policy in the Sanjak of Alexandretta
This paper examines the Sanjak of Alexandretta dispute as a case study for the impact of Turkish nationalism on an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse border zone. Drawing on contemporary Turkish sources and British diplomatic papers, I analyze the process by which the Turkish government, nationalist activists, and League of Nations officials all sought to map the extremely heterogeneous population of the Sanjak into new categories defined by the nation-state ideal and the concept of “minorities” during the 1936-39 dispute over the region. I argue that Turkish policy and rhetoric reflected the early Kemalist state’s contradictory attitude towards minorities, both in its creation of different ethnic categories of belonging, and in its often-paradoxical insistence on assimilation as a viable route into the national community. Turkish nationalism strove to re-define the Sanjak in such as way to make its population legible to the nationalist state, by renaming it “Hatay,” and declaring its inhabitants—in particular, the Arabic-speaking Alawite or Nusayri community—to be essentially Turkish. The invention of Hatay was therefore part of the broader process of negotiating the terms of membership in the Turkish nation in this period. The League of Nations hoped to safeguard the diversity of the region, but restructured the Sanjak's political system along communal lines, thus politicizing group identities in a new way. In the context of nationalist agitation and local heterogeneity, the League-sponsored plebiscite turned into a two-sided competition in which complex group affinities were subsumed into a stark choice between “Turkish” or “Arab” (i.e., Syrian) rule. The resulting process of ethnic unmixing demonstrated the incongruity of nationalist aspirations and the principle of self-determination in regions of intensely concentrated diversity.
In reaction to sepoy's manifesto, an email exchange with dear S. about 'storytelling' as a mode of academic exchange, and my own need to work out the substance of what I am going to say too bloody early in the morning on Saturday (why, may I ask, is the most jet-lagged participant scheduled to deliver her paper first?), here is the beginning of a stab at the polyglot approach to this project--a reluctant phoenix from the ashes of my MPhil thesis, currently incarnating as a contribution to the Oxford Symposium on (Trans)nationalism in the Mediterreanean. First I will tell the tale in formal academic-speak, with the abstract I sent the conference organizers a couple of months ago:
The Invention of Hatay: Nationalism, Minorities, and Colonial Policy in the Sanjak of Alexandretta
This paper examines the Sanjak of Alexandretta dispute as a case study for the impact of Turkish nationalism on an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse border zone. Drawing on contemporary Turkish sources and British diplomatic papers, I analyze the process by which the Turkish government, nationalist activists, and League of Nations officials all sought to map the extremely heterogeneous population of the Sanjak into new categories defined by the nation-state ideal and the concept of “minorities” during the 1936-39 dispute over the region. I argue that Turkish policy and rhetoric reflected the early Kemalist state’s contradictory attitude towards minorities, both in its creation of different ethnic categories of belonging, and in its often-paradoxical insistence on assimilation as a viable route into the national community. Turkish nationalism strove to re-define the Sanjak in such as way to make its population legible to the nationalist state, by renaming it “Hatay,” and declaring its inhabitants—in particular, the Arabic-speaking Alawite or Nusayri community—to be essentially Turkish. The invention of Hatay was therefore part of the broader process of negotiating the terms of membership in the Turkish nation in this period. The League of Nations hoped to safeguard the diversity of the region, but restructured the Sanjak's political system along communal lines, thus politicizing group identities in a new way. In the context of nationalist agitation and local heterogeneity, the League-sponsored plebiscite turned into a two-sided competition in which complex group affinities were subsumed into a stark choice between “Turkish” or “Arab” (i.e., Syrian) rule. The resulting process of ethnic unmixing demonstrated the incongruity of nationalist aspirations and the principle of self-determination in regions of intensely concentrated diversity.
posted by kitabet at 11:21 PM
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