Lecture By Aslı Iğsız: Rethinking Neo-Ottomanism in the Civilizationist Present

Abstract

This talk will address the broader implications of “civilizationism,” through the dynamic reconfigurations of neo-Ottomanism in the contemporary Turkish context.

The unapologetic rise of “ethno-nationalism,” white nationalist, and supremacist narratives in the contemporary world context has led scholars to revisit the histories of totalitarianism, fascism, and authoritarianism. Challenging the idea that these violent racialized histories have been confined to the past, critical scholars argue that their legacies are in fact prominent aspects of the history of the present. Consider for example the “identitarian generation” (the white European movement mobilized to “defend Europe” from immigrants and racialized groups, promoting a white “ethno-state”), or their North American counterparts claiming white European heritage and also demanding a white ethno-state, but also the Muslim internationalist countermobilizations, such as Turkey’s neo-Ottomanist agenda to “unite” and lead world Muslims. Whether identified as “identitarian,” ethnonationalist, pan-European, anti-colonial, or pan-Islamic, “civilizationist” identification is foregrounded in all of them. Indeed, such approaches to identification extract concepts and mechanisms from earlier nationalist projects, and feed them into the larger narratives of civilizationism taking hold today. While doing so, they tend to reproduce a racialized approach to history, art, literature, material culture, and demography.