“Reminders of the Imperial Nostalgia:
Encounters with Blackness in the Early Turkish Republic”
Dr. Ezgi Cakmak
Rutgers University
November 17, 2023
4-6pm
Global Asia Program NYU
53 Washington Square Village (King Juan Carlos Center)
Room 607
(with wine and cheese)
How was the history of African slavery remembered in early Republican Turkey? How could a memory of blackness be traced right after the empire which was once the representation of diversity came to an end? Based on my dissertation entitled “Citizens of a Silenced History: The Legacy of African Slavery and Racial Contours of Citizenship in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic,1857-1933,” in this talk, I would like to lay out a discussion on the ways in which the early Turkish Republic dealt with the legacy of African slavery. Drawing on parliamentary debates on slavery and the lawsuits involving people of African descent people as well as newspaper and journal articles of early republican Turkey, the talk will present how blackness and ideas on slavery were framed within the imperial imaginary in the early Republican period when drawing the boundaries of Turkishness was deemed necessary disown the immediate imperial past.
Ezgi Cakmak is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University and affiliated with the department of Africana Studies at Rutgers–Newark. She received her Ph.D. as a Benjamin Franklin Fellow of Africana Studies and History at the University of Pennsylvania. Before her doctoral studies, she worked with NGOs in the field of international migration and conducted fieldwork with African migrants in Istanbul. Her research interests include African slavery in the late Ottoman empire, identity formation and racialization processes in the early Turkish Republic as well as diaspora studies.
Eve M. Troutt Powell teaches the history of the modern Middle East and the history of slavery in the Nile Valley and the Ottoman Empire. As a cultural historian, she emphasizes the exploration of literature and film in her courses. She has received fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt and the Social Science Research Council, and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2003 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her most recent book is Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement in Egypt, Sudan and the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2012)
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