Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T23:32:29.075Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Information or Culture: The Intellectual Dissemination of Americanism as Common Sense

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2016

Ela Kaçel
Ela Kaçel*
Affiliation:
Bahçeşehir University, Faculty of Architecture and Design, Çırağan Caddesi Osmanpaşa Mektebi Sokak No: 4-6, 34353 Beşiktaş, İstanbul, Turkey
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The discourse of postwar modern architecture is dominated by historical accounts that easily describe the processes of modernization in Turkey during the Cold War as a unilateral flow of ideas and expertise from the United States. Yet, the relation between benefactor and beneficiary is much more complex. This article explores culture production as a state function and intellectual practice through which bureaucrats and intellectuals representing the state agencies disseminated Americanism as common sense in postwar Turkey. Drawing on the cultural activities of two parallel organizations, the Turkish Information Office (TIO) acting in New York and the United States Information Service (USIS) in Turkey, it illustrates how the intricate relations among ideology, politics, and architecture affect the practices of bureaucrats and their audiences in the process of culture production. Promoting ideologies of Americanism, these organizations simultaneously popularized American architects and their buildings to their audiences. The comparative analysis of two case studies, the photo book Talking Turkey by the TIO and the Architecture Series of the Voice of America Forum Lectures, demonstrates how the division created between information and culture as two separate functions of foreign diplomacy perpetuated similar divisions in architectural discourse such as the iconic and the ordinary.

Keywords

Americanismforeign diplomacypostwar modern architecturecultural politicsUnited States Information ServiceTurkish Information Office
Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 50: Special Issue on “Ambivalent Architectures” from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic , Spring 2014 , pp. 171 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey and Cambridge University Press 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmad, Feroz. The Making of Modern Turkey. London: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Albayrak, Mustafa. Türkiye Siyasi Tarihinde Demokrat Parti: 1946–1960. Ankara: Phoenix, 2004.Google Scholar
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Alvarez, David J.Bureaucracy and Cold War Diplomacy: The United States and Turkey, 1943–1946. Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1980.Google Scholar
Bağcı, Hüseyin. Demokrat Parti Dönemi Dış Politikası. Ankara: İmge Kitabevi Yayınları, 1990.Google Scholar
Bora, Tanıl. “Amerika: ‘En’ Batı ve ‘Başka’ Batı.” in Modernleşme ve Batıcılık. Vol. 3 of Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce, edited by Kocabaşoğlu, Uygur, 147-69. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2002.Google Scholar
Bozdoğan, Sibel. “Democracy, Development and the Americanization of Turkish Architectural Culture in the 1950s.” in Modernism and the Middle East, edited by Isenstadt, Sandy and Rizvi, Kishwar, 116-38. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Cody, Jeffrey W.Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Colomina, Beatriz. “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture.” Grey Room 1, no. 2 (2001): 6–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deibel, Terry L. and Roberts, Walter R.. Culture and Information: Two Foreign Policy Functions. Washington Papers 4, no. 40. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976.Google Scholar
Eren, Nuri. “Middle East and Turkey in World Affairs.” Annals of the American Academy of the Political and Social Science 276. Lessons from Asia (1951): 72–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eren, Nuri. “A Second Look at America.” Harper’s Magazine (April 1962): 73.Google Scholar
Eren, Nuri. Turkey Today and Tomorrow: An Experiment in Westernization. New York: Praeger, 1963.Google Scholar
Eren, Nuri. “Why is America Misunderstood?” Reader’s Digest (April 1961): 75–78.Google Scholar
Gaonkar, Dilip P. “On Alternative Modernisms.” in Alternative Modernities, edited by Gaonkar, Dilip P., 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers, 1971.Google Scholar
Harris, George S.Troubled Alliance: Turkish-American Problems in Historical Perspective, 1945–1971. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1972.Google Scholar
Hart, Justin. Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. “The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius.” Architectural Review (January 1947): 3–6.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. The International Style: Architecture since 1922. New York: Norton, 1932.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. The Rise to World Prominence of American Architecture. Vol. 1, Voice of America Forum Lectures Architecture Series. Washington, DC: United States Information Agency, 1961.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Scully, Vincent J., Jordy, William H., et al. Voice of America Forum Lectures: Architecture Series. 12 vols. Washington, DC: United States Information Agency, 1961.Google Scholar
Kaçel, Ela. “Hiltonculuk and Beyond: The Dialectics of Intellectualism in Postwar Turkey.” Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge 2, no. 3 (2010): 9–35.Google Scholar
Kaçel, Ela. “Intellectualism and Consumerism: Ideologies, Practices and Criticisms of Common Sense Modernism in Postwar Turkey.” PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, 2009.Google Scholar
Kaçel, Ela. “This is Not an American House: Good Sense Modernism in 1950s Turkey.” in Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, edited by Lu, Duanfang, 165-85. London: Routledge, 2011.Google Scholar
Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1958.Google Scholar
Lerner, Daniel and Riesman, David. “Self and Society: Reflections on Some Turks in Transition.” Explorations 5 (1955): 67–80.Google Scholar
McGhee, George. The US-Turkish-NATO Middle East Connection: How the Truman Doctrine Contained the Soviets in the Middle East. New York: St Martin’s, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Timothy ed. Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Ninkovich, Frank A.U.S. Information Policy and Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1996.Google Scholar
Ockman, Joan. Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.Google Scholar
Riley, Terence. The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.Google Scholar
Stanford, Nea. “Perky Turk Quips Woo U.S.” in Facts on Turkey. Christian Science Monitor, July 27, 1957. New York: Turkish Information Office (TIO), 1956.Google Scholar
Stanford, Nea. Modern Turkey. New York: TIO, 1947.Google Scholar
Stanford, Nea. New Turkey. New York: TIO, 1959.Google Scholar
Stanford, Nea. Self-Government in Turkey. Turkey Today I. New York: TIO, 1944.Google Scholar
Stanford, Nea. Talking Turkey. New York: TIO, 1957.Google Scholar
United States Information Agency Office of Research and Assessment. Media Habits Among the USIA Target and General Populations in Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey. Washington, DC: United States Information Agency, 1970.Google Scholar
Vanlı, Şevki. “Hiltonculuk.” Kim, November 28, 1958, 21–22.Google Scholar
Wharton, Annabel J. Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Zürcher, Erik Jan. Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar