explaining myself

I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.

-Agha Shahid Ali

So, applications: one's in already, two more will be done soon. My mind has been taken over with fretfulness about these things for weeks now, and I'm getting sick of it. (My close friends, who have been very patient with my restlessness and distraction, are probably even more so). In any case, those around me who have not been subjected to the endless queries and outbursts and monologues keep asking, what do you plan to study? Here is my answer.

I'm applying to three doctoral programs, two of which are here in New York. Two joint history/MES programs, and one anthropology program--which happens to be at my first-choice university (that departmental decision caused the lion's share of the grief, but today--having passed the point where I could change my mind once more--I am feeling quite calm. I'm still going to call myself a historian in any case). This--more or less--is what I'm proposing, as excerpted from the statements of purpose for the history programs. (I'll be revising it for the anthropology program to cover theoretical influences and proposed fieldwork in more detail.) This is what I want to spend the next six or seven years of my life doing.

I am applying...to pursue further study of two longstanding interests: the city of Istanbul, which I have been visiting, photographing, and writing about since the age of eighteen, and Turkish society's fraught relationship with history, a core concern of my academic work. I hope to investigate how the Turkish state, Istanbul's citizens, and other interlocutors have remembered, imagined and policed the city's public history, and examine how these relationships play into the pressing issues at stake—among them national identity, diversity, and modernity. How do people and institutions negotiate the perception of the past in a city where the construction of a new subway means digging through twenty centuries' worth of archaeological ruins?

My master's thesis analyzed the young Turkish Republic's efforts to make the extremely heterogeneous population of a disputed border zone (the Sanjak of Alexandretta) "legible" to the nationalist state, by inventing a history and genealogy for the region and its minority populations to buttress a new definition of the political community. The (re)production of official history played a key role in the nation-state project in Turkey, both in the Kemalist regime's rejection of the Ottoman past and in its elevation of a nationalist history based on pre-Islamic Anatolian heritage.

After completing the M.Phil, I returned to Istanbul, where I worked in autumn 2005 as an editor and translator for BIAnet, a Turkish human rights media NGO. I lived in the city during the period when the current wave of Article 301 cases against writers such as Orhan Pamuk began, and when a controversial and groundbreaking conference on the Armenian genocide took place. I was also present for the 9th Istanbul Bienniale, the theme of which was Istanbul itself—a rich opportunity to explore creative interpretations of what some have called the 'urban imaginary.'

Since my return to the United States, I have remained engaged with the academic conversation around these issues, presenting three conference papers based on my research. Although I value my current work in human rights advocacy, I have always intended to continue my studies at the doctoral level. The assassination of Hrant Dink last February, and my participation in an interdisciplinary graduate conference in his memory (at which Turkish consular officials tried to enter and monitor the discussion) in May, cemented my desire to return. The tumultuous politics of the last year in Turkey have further contextualized the questions I want to explore.

Kemalism, preoccupied with a narrowly Western notion of modernity, shied away from the cosmopolitan and religious associations of Istanbul's Ottoman and Byzantine heritage (and rejected the city itself, relocating the capital to Ankara). But recent decades have witnessed the emergence of new challenges to the Kemalist narrative of Turkish history—from both Islamist and progressive post-nationalist points of view. Such openness has gone hand in hand with intensified efforts to patrol the boundaries of memory—especially where the discussion of the fate of minority groups is concerned. Public and private symbols of reverence for the Kemalist past are omnipresent, yet in the 1990s, Turkish popular culture began to appropriate emblems of the Ottoman era. Neo-Ottoman imagery decorates designer T-shirts and trendy restaurants serve "Ottoman" food, while the popularity of folk music associated with ethnic minorities has exploded, and old Greek, Jewish, and Armenian neighborhoods have become popular real-estate in the gentrifying city. Yet the nostalgic commodification of a presumed multicultural heritage is only one facet of public memory in Republican Istanbul--because competing discourses of the past remain a central element of political contest and the performance of identity (national, ethnic, religious or otherwise) in Turkey today.

I hope to explore these changing constructions of Istanbul's past throughout the Republican period, drawing on a wide variety of sources—including official narratives as set forth in textbooks and state publications; preservation and curation of ruins, monuments, and museums; representations of the past in mass media and popular culture; public interventions by academic institutions and non-governmental bodies like the History Foundation; political activities of nationalist and minority organizations; and cultural practices surrounding the built environment. In addition to archival research, I am interested in gathering oral histories and conducting ethnographic fieldwork. I am excited about the chance to engage with other approaches—including anthropology and urban studies—that can enrich my perspective as a historian. I also hope to enhance my ability to think and write comparatively through further study of the Middle East, South Asia and Africa—particularly of other cities with comparable experiences of rupture, other sites of commemoration and forgetting.

I am interested not only in the study of public history, but in the practice of it. I believe it is crucial for scholars to provide critical perspectives on the Middle East and Islamic world to an audience beyond the bounds of the academy, especially in the light of current US policy in the region. To this end, I intend to maintain my involvement in the public discussion as an activist and writer, while focusing on research and teaching as my primary interventions.