The Invention of Ancestors - The Struggle for Memory under the AKP Government

Book Description: The Invention of Ancestors - The Struggle for Memory under the AKP Government

19 May Beginning of the War of Independence – 29 May Conquest of Istanbul… 23 April National Sovereignty and Children's Day – 29 April Kut'ul Amara Victory… 29 October Republic Day – 15 July Epic… Ankara – Istanbul… Republic – Ottoman…
"Memory wars" prevailed in Turkey during the long rule of the Justice and Development Party, which started in 2002. This is a struggle that manifests itself in architecture, building scales, naming of places, national holidays and ceremonies. The first phase in the government's struggle to dominate social memory was to revive an alternative counter-memory to the Kemalist-republican memory. The next phase was to transform this counter-memory into the memory of power. This is, as Reyhan Ünal Çınar defines it, a phase of "memory training that standardizes and even dictates all remembering and forgetting." Çınar shows that the power memory of the "new Türkiye" is based on an ingenious production of neo-Ottomanist nostalgia. He makes a distinction between constitutive nostalgia in the process of reconstruction and ersatz-nostalgia (or substitute nostalgia): the latter is the commodified representation of the fiction of a pseudo-past that was never lived, experienced. The effort to understand whether the memory revived and staged by the AKP government is "a 'ghost story' collected from the past or the 'imagination' capacity of the AKP" gives the present work its dynamism.

(From the Promotional Bulletin)

Dough Type: 2nd Dough

Number of Pages: 268

Size: 13 x 19.5

First Print Year: 2020

Number of Printings: 1st Edition

Language Turkish