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The Practice of Cultural Studies in the Turkish Republic

In recent years, numerous books and articles have appeared, focusing on how cultural studies has emerged in different countries such as France, Germany, Austria, Australia, Britain, the United States, the Nordic countries, Finland, and Mexico. With so much material appearing on the subject, one might be prompted to question the validity of writing about the Turkish context, other than to demonstrate that each country has its own version of cultural studies, which may be worthy of sustained empirical analysis. Nonetheless, perhaps the subject may be of interest, on the grounds that, while being a comparatively new discipline (the first cultural studies-related courses only began to appear on university curricula in the mid-1990s), the subsequent progress of cultural studies been shaped by the Kemalist project (instigated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the creation of the Republic in 1923) which has endeavored to create a new national culture combining western models with local traditions. The primary purpose of this project lies in modernization—in other words, maintaining the kind of cultural experience associated with notions of progress and development, especially in the west. Even today, there is a noticeable reluctance by many academics from all disciplines to discard the idea that modernization will, one day, lead to a fulfillment of Turkey’s destiny. There is a parallel suspicion of globalization (and pluralism) and the fragmentation of political and cultural identity that it is thought to entail (Rumford 2000, 140). In this article, I want to focus on how cultural studies has been translated into the Turkish context in terms of this modernizing framework, and how the process of remaking it has raised some interesting questions about interdisciplinarity: should it exist or should it be rejected on the grounds that it seeks to abandon established disciplinary models (and thereby prompt questions as to the future of university departments). Firstly, I shall suggest that The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 26:111–127, 2004 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 1071-4413 print DOI: 10.1080=10714410490480377