Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
This dissertation considers how individuals, families, societies and nations pursue connection and belonging. When the present appears, at best, to lack an essential, or, at worst, to denigrate possibilities for human flourishing, people glance backwards to identify what they are missing. Within cityscapes, this sense of lack or longing appears related to urban living: anonymity despite crowds, financial stress despite jobs, discomfort despite amenities, artificiality despite infrastructure. Responses to dissatisfaction include remembering one's own past or the pasts of forebears, and then revisiting, reevaluating, rehearsing and reclaiming them. “What do we need that we left behind?” “What is essential to our well-being?” Such questions and related activities may be analyzed via concepts of nostalgia. In light of developments in nostalgia studies since the “productive” turn of the late 1990s, there are numerous helpful approaches for contemplating how people discuss, leverage and utilize their real and imagined pasts.
I situate my research in contemporary Turkey, claiming that Turkey is an apt case study for evaluating nostalgia on several registers. Contextual reasons include: 1) Nostalgia has been integral to nation-building processes, 2) The growth of cities along with rural-to-urban migration has occurred rapidly and recently, especially since the 1950s, and 3) Connections to places of origin are intentionally explored, cultivated and maintained. I also note that tendencies for nostalgic re-evaluation are inspired by disillusionment with state discourse, dissatisfaction with city life and disturbance over perceived geopolitical threats. Turkey is thus a promising context in which to observe a plethora of situated, overlapping and imbricated nostalgias. Such nostalgias are multi-scalar, as they facilely shift from the individual to the state and from the vernacular to the official. This renders them observable for analysis from numerous vantage points.
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Committee: Morgan Liu (Advisor); Johanna Sellman (Committee Member); Katherine Borland (Committee Member); Kendra McSweeney (Committee Member)
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies