A Different Route to ”Turkishness”: Race Ideology and Whiteness in the Late Ottoman Empire

INVITATION to a LECTURE

A Different Route to ”Turkishness”: Race Ideology and Whiteness in the Late Ottoman Empire

Dr. Daniel Kolland (Freie Universität Berlin)

Wednesday, 13th November 2024, 19:00 (Turkish time; GMT +3)

In this talk, Daniel Kolland challenges historiographical genealogies of Turkish nationalism. Arguing that race was an element of late Ottoman Turkish nationalism that scholarship so far has overlooked, the presentation zooms-in on two discourses propelled by the same social circle of young, Francophile, Turkish-writing, elite-school graduates: nervousness (neurasthenia) and ‘Turkish’ national literature. First, it shows how they diagnosed themselves with nervousness, which was understood as the function of a racially evolved physiology and “modern civilization,” thereby repurposing this medicalized discourse to inscribe themselves in white-supremacist global race hierarchies. Second, in defense of their controversial, Europe-inspired „Servet-i Fünun literature,“ they argued that it was the “natural” expression of the evolution of the Turkish race. Conceptualizing Turks as a subgroup of the white race, they propagated “Turkishness” (türklük) as unequivocally un-Islamic and Europe-oriented but still authentic identity for Turkish-speakers. The talk discusses the political and intellectual context and implications of this Turkishness as identifier of secularism and racial whiteness that was arguably closer to Kemalist nationalism than the Gökalpian Turkism of the Second Constitutional Period.

Daniel Kolland works on the intellectual history of the late Ottoman Empire. His Ph.D. research 2017-2021) at Freie Universität Berlin on concepts of historical change in the periodical Servet-i Fünun (1891-1944) have so far resulted in publications on Ottoman evolutionism and on the global history of modernity concepts. Work in progress include a book manuscript and two further articles. Interested in the whole spectrum of late-Ottoman and early-Republican intellectual history, his next research project addresses concepts of Islam through the prisms of religionization and secularization.

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