HISTORY, POLITICS AND CULTURE OF TURKEY THROUGH CINEMA

Course Objectives: This course aims to discuss issues in Turkish history and society through the perspective of movies. The goal is to familiarize the students with several central themes such as modernization, secularism, westernization, and migration through visual popular culture materials. Thanks to this, the students will not only learn about major codes of Turkish political culture subjects but will also see how different Turkish directors and scriptwriters utilized these codes in both arthouse and commercial films. In fact, even though there are many differences between these films in terms of style and production, there is a critical thematic connection “characterized by an obsession with the tropes of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’” (Suner, 2004: 307). This point, as it will be shown in the films, may have emerged as a response to anxiety around ethnic/national/classbased/gender-based identities and the Turkish modernization’s way of dealing with a multitude of voices.

Course Content: The course explores politics, history and culture of Turkey by relying on specific themes about nationalism, internal and external migration, the formation of social classes, gender, political Islam and globalization.