Before introducing the articles in the 70th issue of New Perspectives on Turkey, which is a special issue, we would like to start this editorial letter with important and exciting news: this issue inaugurates a structural change in our editorial team. NPT’s persistently interdisciplinary approach continues to be its greatest asset and strength and yet it is also an endeavor proving to be more difficult to sustain in our increasingly specialized age. To be able to better evaluate paper submissions and support accepted articles through their publication process, we have decided to institute the role of associate editorships, which will consist of a team of scholars from eight different fields: social policy (Volkan Yılmaz), economics (Murat Koyuncu), political science (Umut Türem), history (Can Nacar), literature (Zeynep Uysal), international relations (Behlül Özkan), cultural studies (R. Ertuğ Altınay), and environmental studies (Irmak Ertör). We welcome our colleagues on board, convinced that their expertise will contribute greatly to our editorial processes.
New Perspectives on Turkey’s 70th issue comes at a time when Turkish society is yet again preoccupied with elections, this time the local elections of 2024. While Turkey is immersed in local politics, the regions surrounding it continue to be engulfed by ever-increasing forms of violence, war, and economic and political crises. The ongoing decimation of the civilian population in the Palestinian lands by Israel both through military attacks and by depriving them of vital supplies including food and medicine has resulted in one of the most closely monitored, documented, and yet permitted-to-go-on social and human disasters. The war on Ukraine is still raging and Russia had elections only a few months after Alexey Navalny perished under Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime. Violence, repression, and economic suffering in Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been pushed to the margins of public attention in the face of a deadlier war in the Middle East. One of the most important consequences of this violent instability is migration and exile. Hence, our current special issue on exile is a timely response to our global contemporary predicament.
The special issue “Narrating Exile in the Ottoman and Post-Ottoman World” includes six articles well framed by the special issue’s editors Houssine Alloul, Enno Maessen, and Uğur Ümit Üngör’s introduction. The issue also includes a postscript by Edhem Eldem. As Alloul, Maessen, and Üngör describe the articles in detail we will keep our introduction very brief.
The first article by Ramazan Hakkı Öztan follows the trails of two Young Turk self-exiles who fled from İstanbul to Rusçuk (Ruse in today’s Bulgaria) at the end of the nineteenth century. The article, documenting the political activism of İbrahim Temo and Mustafa Ragıp, captures the brewing radicalization along the Danubian cities at this particular historical juncture. The second article by Uğur Zekeriya Peçe inserts the role of Cretan exiles in İstanbul as leading agents of mass politics in the aftermath of 1908. Peçe brings to our attention cross-class collaboration in generating oppositional politics among exiles and refugees to show us that being uprooted generates not only victimhood but also impetus for collective action.
The next article by Burcu Gürsel is on Ottoman writers who had enslaved mothers. By closely studying Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Validem, written at the time of Hamid’s enslaved mother’s death at the end of the nineteenth century and published with a sequel right before World War I, explores exile around the notions of motherland and the fatherland as the son mourns for his lost mother as well as for her lost motherland. Artemis Papatheodorou’s article is next. Based on the memories of ordinary people from Lithri (Ildırı), Nymphaio (Kemalpaşa), and Ayasolouk (Selçuk) harbored in the oral history archives of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies as well as the diary of Smyrnian Nobel-laureate poet George Seferis, Papatheodorou discusses how antiquities served as conduits for expressing the trauma of uprootedness and forced exile.
Charalampos Minasidis’s article is on the experiences of Greek Orthodox internal exiles during World War I. Again, based on sources housed in the Centre for Asia Minor Studies and relying on some family archives, the article documents the intricacies of exile experience recognizing the agency of those forced to live in labor battalions or open internment camps. The final article of the issue by Alexandros Lamprou is on an understudied group of Greek refugees, namely, refugees from Greece to Turkey and other countries in the Middle East during World War II. The article argues that the wartime Turkish refugee policy was shaped by both its demographic needs and the military, political, and diplomatic conjuncture of the war. The special issue concludes with Edhem Eldem’s piece which is derived from the keynote address of the conference entitled “Narrating Exile in and between Europe and the Ottoman Empire/Modern Turkey” from which this special issue originated.
Finally in this issue, we feature six book reviews on books on history, politics, cultural studies, and international relations. The first one by Ebrar Şahika Küçükaşcı is on Mostafa Minawi’s Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire discussing a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists based in İstanbul in the last half century of the Ottoman Empire. The second review is by Anoush Tamar Suni discussing Nilay Özok-Gündoğan’s Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy and Privilege, a work on the long history of Kurdish nobility from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The third review is by Feyda Sayan-Cengiz and discusses Claudia Liebelt’s Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey. The fourth review, also focusing on women and their consumption choices, is by T. Deniz Erkmen and discusses Sertaç Sehlikoğlu’s Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul. The fifth review is by Çetin Çelik and is on İlkim Büke Okyar’s Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876–1950: National Self and Non-National Other. The sixth and final review of the issue is from the field of international relations and written by Kadir Selamet on Eren Duzgun’s Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity.
Committed as always to interdisciplinarity, New Perspectives on Turkey’s 70th issue brings together a set of articles written from different disciplinary vantage points on the historical experiences of exile in the territories of the Empire. For the last several decades, but especially in the past ten years, the region surrounding Turkey has once again become a geography of flight and exile. We hope that these articles cast a light on not only their own periods but also on our understanding of the experiences of seeking refuge in the current moment.
