Görsel İletişim Tasarımı Bölümü Koleksiyonu

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12469/62

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Browsing Görsel İletişim Tasarımı Bölümü Koleksiyonu by Journal "Performance Research"

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    Citation - WoS: 6
    Citation - Scopus: 7
    Hidden Archives, Closeted Desires, Postponed Utopias: Queer Ultra-Nationalism in Turkish Opera
    (2022) Altınay, Rüstem Ertuğ
    How do queer intellectuals produce dramatic texts for utopian archival projects? How do (once) hidden theatre practices exist in a complicated relationship with the claims about covert or clandestine performances in the messy afterlives of such unorthodox archives? This essay explores such processes and how they unfolded in the context of Turkish opera by focusing on the work of Rıza Nur (1879-1942). Rıza Nur was a queer Turkish politician who created an archive of resistance to propagate his ultra-nationalist and eugenicist utopian vision for Turkey’s future during the country’s formative years. In addition to his proposed programs for Turkey’s revivification and the establishment of an ultra-nationalist party, the archive also included Nur’s memoirs, essays, poetry, and two of his librettos. Nur trusted this archive to multiple European libraries on the condition that it would not be accessible until 1960. Nur’s desire was that once his archive would become public, it would transform Turkish people’s understanding of the past, make them recognize him as an unappreciated true leader, and adopt his utopian vision. Rıza Nur’s librettos demonstrate how operatic writing can function as an undercover strategy of queer self-making. The librettos reveal how archives function not only as repositories but also as sites of production, and how dramatic texts can gain queer dimensions and political significance in relation to other texts. Archives can thus provide crucial insights into discrete theatre practices and create important opportunities to review and revise performance historiographies. Nevertheless, the limited scholarly attention Nur’s librettos have received suggests how disciplinary and methodological conventions may render dramatic texts invisible even when they are in plain sight. Finally, Nur’s ultra-nationalist and eugenicist utopian archive challenges the tendency to associate queer utopian performance with progressive politics.
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    Theatre and Solidarity Among the Transnational Alevi Community: Memory, Trauma and Political Economy
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-05-12) Kalıntaş, Rüya
    The Alevi religious minority makes up the largest religious minority in Turkey, and their history of persecution dates back before the Republic of Turkey. The inception of the Republic of Turkey as a secular nation-state in 1923 was initially promising for the Alevis, but the regime remained implicitly Sunni Muslim. So, the community’s experiences of citizenship and belonging continued to be characterized by precarity as they occupied a category of national objection. Beginning in the 1960s, the waves of migration from rural areas to urban Turkey and Western Europe gradually transformed the experiences of the Alevi community and they became more visible. With migration, Alevi people’s everyday experiences of oppression and discrimination as well as their need for community-building and solidarity intensified. In Europe, the Alevi diaspora was too often categorized simply as Turkish or Muslim immigrants. Many of them wanted to differentiate themselves from the Sunni Muslim Turkish majority in the diaspora and gain recognition as a distinct group. They organized in their new homelands and established formal and informal networks of transnational solidarity. In the formation and sustenance of these networks and solidarity, theatre has played a crucial role. The plays staged by Alevi community theatres and professional groups in Turkey and its diasporas have focused primarily on the histories of violence and persecution against Alevis. As such, theatre functions as a site for the constitution of public memory and the intergenerational transfer and transformation of trauma and serves the affective politics of community-building and solidarity among the transnational Alevi community. The political economy of these performances is a crucial element of the politics of solidarity, contributing to the sustenance of Alevi cultural producers and their communities.