by Ipek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu, Director, Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program, Northwestern University
The Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program spring speaker series “Reflections on Whiteness, Blackness, and Race in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey” is available for viewing on our Youtube channel. In light of the current debates on race in the US, the Middle East, and around the world, this interdisciplinary speaker series contributes to the global conversations on race by featuring scholars who work on race-making in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Transcending the epistemological presumptions on the presence or absence of racial difference in these polities, this speaker series focuses on the specific trajectories, resonances, transformation, and circulation of racial markers, vocabularies, and categories. Whiteness and blackness prevail in this conversation not as empirical phenomena but as practices of seeing, performing, and ways of being as well as analytical devices used to understand the relationality of race. At a crucial time when both racism and anti-racism has taken the global center stage, this speaker series also underlines the ethical and political implications of questioning the past and present of race relations in Turkey.
The series features speakers:
Baki Tezcan teaches history at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World, and about forty articles on Islam, modern Turkish historiography, and Ottoman history and historiography. His talk “The Emasculated Guardians of Power: Black Eunuchs and the Interplay Between Gender and Race at the Ottoman Imperial Court” took place joined us on March 12, 2021.
Ezgi Güne, (anthorpology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) gave the talk “Scramble for African Hearts: Muslim Whiteness, Islamic Civility, and Interracial Intimacy in AKP’s Turkey” on March 31, 2021. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography in Turkey, Tanzania, Senegal, Gambia, and Benin, Dr. Güner shows how whiteness, historically associated with Western modernity and state secularism in Turkey, is redefined as the marker of Islamic civility in and through these transnational relations. Analysis of the construction of Muslim whiteness contributes to debates on intersectionality of race and religion in the context of the Middle East, Africa, and their transnational connections.
The final talk in the series is “The Roots of the Silence: Encounters with Blackness in Early Turkish Republic” by Ezgi Çakmak (University of Pennsylvania). The talk will take place Friday, May 7 at 12pm. Register for the event.