UC Davis

A comparative study of German and Turkish literature and film, this dissertation analyzes the entanglement of processes of modernization and discourses of racialization. Drawing on Moishe Postone’s work, the first part examines the relationship between modernity and race in the context of the transition from pre-modern “anti-Judaism” to modern antisemitism. While this transition is often explained by means of a paradigm shift—race replaces religion as the dominant identity category—Postone identifies a connection between the social relations inscribed in the commodity form and the underlying ideological structures of antisemitism. Instead of limiting the ascription of the “abstract” to figurations of Jews in antisemitic imagery, however, my reading detaches Postone’s theory of racism from the idiosyncrasies of German-Jewish history, and, by linking the emergence of the modern notion of race to developments immanent to capitalist modernity as such, proposes to establish a theoretical basis capable of transcending Western metropolitan borders. The second part of this dissertation then illuminates how in the Levante as well the emergence of the modern concept of race was part and parcel of accelerated processes of nation-building and capitalist modernization. Finally, the third part examines representations of the Armenian genocide and the racialization of Armenians in the Weimar era and in contemporary German cultural discourse.