The Shared Political Production of ‘the East’ as a ‘Resistant’ Territory and Cultural Sphere in the Kemalist Era, 1923-1938

• Main Author: Jordi Tejel Gorgas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association pour la Recherche sur le Moyen-Orient 2009-12-01
• Series: European Journal of Turkish Studies
• Subjects: contest; cultural sphere; Eastern Turkey; Kurds; politicization; space
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ejts/4064

While traditional accounts of Atatürk’s Turkey approach the state as a powerful and centralized apparatus, this article suggests, on the contrary, that Turkey was still a state in the making and lacked a consistent policy in the face of the multiple social and political challenges that emerged in the 1920 and 1930s. Concretely, the article suggests that the Turkish regime’s response to contestation was to put in place extremely violent policies concerning the inhabitants of the Eastern provinces, in particular. In so doing, it paradoxically contributed to the creation of a specific ‘territorial’ and ‘cultural’ entity: ‘the East.’ It also argues that despite Kemalist elites’ strong ideological commitment, Turkish authorities were obliged to take into consideration the dissenting discourses elaborated by Kurdish intellectuals who claimed the existence of a Kurdish region in Eastern Anatolia. In that respect, and based on a historical approach, the article analyzes the Kemalist period through the lens of the interaction between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement in order show how cultural, political, and religious spaces are constructed, reshaped, and eventually politicized as an outcome of the struggle between the state and some segments of a given society.