Ghosts of Slavery: Race in the Making of Hegemonic Turkishness

• In Event: Hauntings

Abstract

Studies on Turkish nationalism contend that Turkishness was constructed as an ethno-religious identity that is “raceless”: Since the 1930s, three markers have defined this construction: speaking Turkish, adopting Turkish names, and a Sunni Muslim heritage. According to this formulation, Turkishness was “open to all” and hence, incompatible with the emergence of racism or racist ideologies. A second parallel discourse also helped sustain this myth, which portrayed the history of slavery in the Ottoman Empire as either “non-existent” or “benign.” These (mis)representations have led to collective amnesia in the Turkish public imagination and have, in turn, facilitated the marginalization of slavery and race as external categories both in mainstream discourses and in scholarly discussions: as imported problems from the West. Yet, racialized hierarchies were instilled in the Turkish nation-making project from the very onset.
This article looks at how race was imagined in the formation years of the Turkish Republic and slavery was remembered by members of the Turkish Parliament through analyzing a lengthy debate that took place in 1944. During this heated discussion on Capital Punishment in the Turkish Parliament, MPs openly invoked the legacy of slavery and the superiority of the Turks over Blacks in determining whether or not a Turk should be condemned to the death penalty for murdering a Black Turkish citizen. Presenting the literature on the history of racial projects in this era, along with previously unearthed archival material, I explain how hegemonic Turkishness has instilled a racialized sense of civic and legal selves through incorporating a constellation of gendered, sexualized and militarized meanings. This article, ultimately, shows how heteropatriarchy and racial logics in the form of anti-Black racism were merged at the Turkish Parliament, and hence pointed out how racialized, gendered and militarized notions of Turkishness existed “in and through” each other.

Author

• Aysegul Kayagil, SOAS, University of London