UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates how an imaginary of East/West difference has continued to shape political subjectivities, historical understandings, and embodied conceptions of national belonging in Turkey. It draws together theories and methods from anthropology, history, political science, and comparative literature to explore how this imaginary has impacted domestic politics, social struggles, historical interpretations, and contests over the grounds and expression of cultural identity. With close attention to how the “idea” or “fantasy” of the West emerged in the late Ottoman period, developed under the threat of European colonization, and then became integral to a variety of transformative political projects (including “Kemalism,” the political ideology attributed to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the more recent “Erdoğanism” attributed to current president Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party, “AKP”), this dissertation examines the cultural forms, modes of historical understanding, and conceptions of national belonging that ideas of East/West difference—and of the “idea of the West” in particular—have enabled, the others they have suppressed, and the social and political futures these ideas may catalyze or foreclose.