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Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. By Esra
ISBN-13: 978-0822338956
Kemalist-secular ideology of the state and as attended a public schools where this
official ideology was being taught with passion. I learned to keep my critical
comments about the regime to myself pretty quickly. At school Kemal Ataturk was
saved the country and fashioned Turkey into a modern Western republic. At home,
my beloved grand father would speak about the manner in which that apostate
(kafir) betrayed the only true Islamic state, the Ottoman Empire. 1
This opposition was vivid in my mind as I read Esra Ozyureks book Nostalgia for
I was in my senior year of high school when this book was published in Turkish and
I was amazed by the way she criticized Kemalism, even though she belongs to a
family of well-known Kemalists politicians in Turkey. Six years after its publication,
the book is still relevant in its description and analysis of the complex relation of a
1To see a striking account of this schizophrenic dilemma the opposing perspective
of Iranian secular youth under the Islamic state, Varzi, Warring Souls, 2006.
Kemalism has been one of the most influential fields for the scholars of
Westernized state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire were epitomized by his
revolutionism, nationalism and etatism. These principles were named as six arrows
of Kemalism and at the same time they form the essential policies of Republican
Peoples Party (CHP) which was founded by Ataturk himself and was the first
political party in Turkey. With Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and
everyday politics in Turkey, Ozyurek enriches this literature from the perspective of
a scholar who has distanced herself from the Kemalist circles she grew up in as the
In the book Ozyurek argues that secular state ideology is privatized through
nostalgia. She analyzes the ways in which the Kemalist ideology had penetrated into
the private sphere of the citizens along with the neoliberal market reforms. By
adopting this passion for nostalgia to the consumerist demands of the market, in the
age of neoliberal market reforms, Kemalist state ideology expanded its scope, which
is thought to be within the boundaries of the public sphere, into citizens private
2 Esra Ozyureks father Mustafa Ozyurek was elected for the National Assembly in
2002, right after she completed her ethnographic study. Her critical stance against
Kemalism appeared in the mainstream media and she mentions the tensions she
had with her family and friends in the book.
3 In the interviews that Ozyurek conducted with self-identified Kemalists(she uses
the term secular to define her interviewees), followers of the Kemalist ideology
claim that under the Kemalist single-party regime, all citizens obeyed the
authoritarian state out of their love for their leader, Ataturk.
spheres. Though this expansion was initially a reaction to the invasion of the private
what was previously defined as official state ideology ceased to be limited by public
changes in the life stories of first generation Kemalists, museum exhibitions, and
judge headscarved women because of their choices. This analysis of the self-
predetermined conditions of the public sphere as Talal Asad argues in his famous
4 Such as Islamists and Kurds who were suppressed under the corporatist Kemalist
regime. In 1980s Islamists started to use new opportunity spaces that were created
by market reforms effectively and became more visible in daily life, Ozyurek argues
pg.X
5 Foucault, M. (1991). 'Governmentality', trans. Rosi Braidotti and revised by Colin
Gordon, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect:
Studies in Governmentality, pp. 87104.. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Following her analysis of the interviews, she tries to understand in a
neoliberal context, how the relations of the citizens with the state evolve from a
paternal tie to a voluntary, personal affair. Along with this privatization of the state,
one of the most prominent symbols of the Republic - the statues of Ataturk, were
commodified and were moved to the private sphere. Celebrations of official holidays
were transformed as well, formal activities organized in the schools with obligatory
attendance of school kids left their places to free pop music concerts held in the
streets, open to everyone. Lastly, she specifies how Islamists employed this concept
of public and private in the Turkish context, the book could be considered
overshadows the persuasiveness of her arguments. For example, despite the fact
that she gives a brief historical background in the beginning, she neglects the
necessary to boost the nations welfare and the states prosperity. In the absence of
substituting Industrialization as many so-called third world countries did that time.
led system. But she fails to give us the background information of this policy
every student who has a basic knowledge of Turkish politics, she must be aware of
Ozyurek insists that the yearning for the wealthy and peaceful past arises
from Kemalists sense of nostalgia and the longing for the 1930s implies that notions
of time and progress are reversed in Turkey and that the golden era of Kemalism is
not derived from the loss of status and affluence but rather because of the loss of the
monopoly over resources. Ozyurek correctly refers to this power struggle between
seculars and other groups and the distribution of resources that underlies this
the first chapter, she notes how dates of personal significance, such as birthdays,
She interprets this as the penetration of state ideology into the private sphere in the
this is not a new phenomenon. Rather, during the Ottoman Empire people usually
used official state events as reference points for personal histories. Even more
troubling is Ozyureks claim that a girl in white clothes represents the Republic as a
part of patriarchal Middle Eastern culture. Not only does this claim seem guilty of
ignorant of how the female body is used by fascists regimes of Europe in the nation-
building process. 8
chapter, where she claims that the Islamist Virtue Partys alternatively constituted
which they interpreted differently from the secular Kemalists as religion. At best
Ozyureks reading is nave. She neglects the possibility of Islamists using Ataturks
hypocrisy. She rightly refers to the prior alliances between Islamists and Ataturk
and the Kurds and Ataturk. But, she merely assumes the Virtue Partys efforts to
justify their presence in the political arena through their respect for the Republic
and its leader, without considering alternatives. This is not to argue that one can
speculate about the hidden agenda or secret strategies of the Virtue Partys
her hypothesis.
Yet, despite these deficits, Ozyurek presents a revealing study of the interrelations
between the public and the private, aiming to show that the boundaries between
these spaces are artificial results of the power relationships. Unlike the assertions of
the secularization thesis, the state and the society, the private and the public