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This book presents gendered readings of cultural manifestations that relate to the Ottoman era as a preferred past and a model for the future. By means of claims of authenticity and the distribution of imaginaries of a homogenous desirable alternative to everyday concerns, as well as invoking an imperial past at the national level. In this mode of thinking, shaped around a polarised worldview, Republican ideals serve as a counter-image to the promoted splendour and harmony of the Ottomans. Yet, the stereotypical gender roles inextricably linked with this neo-Ottoman imaginary remain largely unacknowledged, dissimulated in the construction of the desire of an idealised past. Our adaption of a cultural studies perspective in this volume puts special emphasis on agency, gender, and authority. It provides a shared ground for the interrogation, through the contributions comprising this project of knowledge production about the past in light of what constitutes acceptable legitimacy in interpreting not only the canonical literature, but history at large.
List of contents
Chapter 1: I am the Granddaughter of the Sultan': Gender, Aesthetics and Agency in Neo-Ottoman Imaginaries.- Chapter 2: Neo-Ottomanism versus Ottomania: Contestation of Gender in Historical Drama.- Chapter 3: Lovers of the Rose: Islamic Affect and the Politics of Commemoration in Turkish Museal Display.- Chapter 4: Between Memory and Forgetting and Purity and Danger: The Case of the Ulucanlar Prison Museum.- Chapter 5: Architectures of Domination? Ideology, Neoliberalism and the Built Environment of 'New Turkey'.- Chapter 6: Commemorating the First World War and its Aftermath: Neo-Ottomanism, Gender and the Politics of History in Turkey.- Chapter 7: The New Ottoman Henna Nights and Women in the Palace of Nostalgia.- Chapter 8: Claiming the Neo-Ottoman Mosque: Islamism, Gender, Architecture.- Chapter 9: Post-Truth and Anti-Science in Turkey: Putting it into Perspective.- Chapter 10: Mixed Marriage Patterns of Rum Orthodox, Jewish, and Armenian Communities of Istanbul: Gendering Ethno-Religious Boundaries.- Chapter 11: Epilogue: From the Past to the Future.
About the author
Catharina Raudvere is Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Petek Onur is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
