Literature

As scholars we have still only scratched the surface of the incredible breadth and complexity of Nâzım Hikmet’s writings. He wrote in a variety of genres and styles, drawing liberally from Divan poetry, folk literature, Futurism, and socialist realism—sometimes within the space of a single poem. His work was concerned with the specificity of Turkish conditions while also being suffused through and through with his internationalist commitments. His influence on the development of modern Turkish poetry cannot be underestimated: Nâzım’s iconoclastic demolishing of all literary idols cleared space not only for the work of Turkish socialist poets but for all subsequent Turkish poetic movements. However, the socialist poets of the 1940s Generation and the younger left-wing poets writing in the 1960s explicitly saw themselves as the bearers of Nâzım’s mantle. This paper explores the reception of Nâzım Hikmet among these ‘60s poets. Operating in the relatively liberal political environment of the 1961 constitution and benefiting from the gradual legalization of Nâzım’s works, the socialist writers of the ‘60s reflect Nâzım’s influence in their poetry and criticism. Did these ‘60s poets display the same radical open-endedness of Nâzım’s poetry—of clear political tendency yet never dogmatic—in their own works? Or did they produce a prescriptive aesthetics? I look at the late-‘60s campaign by socialist writers against the modernist and abstract poetry of the İkinci Yeni movement and also explore Ataol Behramoğlu’s conception of “organic poetry” in order assess the degree to which ‘60s poets take up and transform Nâzım Hikmet’s poetic legacy.

In a 1948 poem that Nazım Hikmet wrote from prison, the poet famously blames his chronic heart condition on the unruly identifications of his heart: it races with the Red Army in China, is riddled with bullets in Greece, and dwells in a run-down house in Çamlıca. In this Nazim Hikmet’s poetry is paradigmatic not only of a Popular Front internationalism, but also of currents of political thought and cultural production that for reasons both ideological and strategic eschewed the parochial boundaries of the nation in favor of political solidarity and creative collaboration.  In this vein, my paper will make the case for twentieth-century Turkish Leftist poetry as an important participant in the global networks associated with radical politics. These sometimes underground networks facilitated the exchange of texts, translations, formal innovations and themes. Inspired by Russian Futurism and Walt Whitman; supported in prison by Aragon, Tzara and Brecht; translated by Yannis Ritsos and Suman Pokhrel; and read by Joan Baez and Denise Levertov, Nazim Hikmet himself participated in such a global network. He is not the only such Turkish poet, as the examples of Zülfü Livaneli, Ataol Behramoğlu and others suggest. Following the work of critic Asım Bezirci on Greek and Turkish poetry as well as Sennur Sezer’s recent study of the role of literature in the Turkish 1960s, I argue that placing twentieth-century Turkish poetry within the framework of global radicalism and anti-imperialism can provide a powerful corrective to East/West binaries and allow us to think outside the boundaries of national traditions.

Official Turkish nationalism was suspicious of the Mediterranean, considering it a symbol of decadent Ottoman cosmopolitanism. Literary movements like ‘Nev-Yunanilik’ (New Hellenism) and ‘Mavi Anadolu’ (Blue Anatolia) provided a counter-narrative that located Turkey within a shared Mediterranean history. Writers like Yahya Kemal Beyatlı and Sabahattin Eyüboğlu used Anatolia’s Hellenistic heritage to argue for Turkey’s rightful place in Europe. At the same time, they denied this same European status to their Greek neighbors. This paper argues that ambivalence about living Hellenes, and by extension Europe, lies at the center of the contradictory thalassic tropes used in the literature of New Hellenism and Blue Anatolia.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jottturstuass.5.issue-2

What set the work of Costa-Gavras apart from fellow left-wing directors like Jean-Luc Godard or Gillo Pontecorvo, however, is that he thought cinema could both be revolutionary and popular, consciousness-building and entertaining. Aware that most viewers don’t care much for avant-garde experiments or newsreel-like accuracy, Costa-Gavras explained his own approach to filmmaking with the adage: “You don’t catch flies with vinegar.” The honey of his films is excitement, action, and suspense. As in Z, he harnessed the excitement of plot and stylish, quick edits to draw in the viewer.  Aware of the average cinema-goer’s habits and expectations, he found a way to deliver radical content in a genuinely popular form.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/costa-gavras-z-1968-radical-cinema

Can you produce a cinematic dystopia about a historical situation that has itself already reached dystopian proportions? Can the abject terror that suffuses everyday lived experience under current, intersecting crises be represented within the bounds of the horror film? What uneasy, tenuous relationship exists between genre and the real, and how much pressure can be put on this link before the fictional world and our historical one collapse into each other? In thematizing Turkey’s past and ongoing historical nightmare, Istanbul-based director Ceylan Özgün Özçelik’s first feature film Inflame (2017) has created a new occasion for reflection on the political uses of genre film.

https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/07/27/turkey-in-flames-genre-film-memory-and-politics-in-kaygi/

After handicrafts and TV melodramas a new and unlikely item has been added to Turkey’s list of cultural exports: psychedelic rock.

Legendary Turkish rock acts from the 1960s and 1970s — such as Mogollar, Baris Manco, Cem Karaca and 3 Hurel — now have a following in North America and Western Europe. Glossy reissues of Turkish rock LPs can be found in record stores from Chicago to Stockholm. American rappers Mos Def and Dr Dre have used samples of blistering guitar solos from Turkish protest-rocker Selda Bagcan in their songs. Bagcan herself, now 70 years old, plays packed festivals in Spain and the Netherlands with an international group of youngsters as her backup band. American actor Elijah Wood of "The Lord of the Rings" and musician Annie Clark have both come out publicly as fans of ‘60s Turkish rock.

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/12/turkish-psychedelic-music-goes-global.html

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

Are Muslims the "new Jews" of Europe? The spectacle of Middle Eastern and African refugees shuttled by train from camp to squalid camp has understandably drawn parallels to the darkest pages in twentieth-century continental history. Such a historical comparison between Islamophobia and antisemitism, however, risks missing their ongoing interrelation. This article examines that interrelation, arguing that Islamophobia and antisemitism now most resemble each other as complementary mechanisms for diverting the anxieties bred by the global economic order. Antisemitism has long scapegoated the Jews for capitalism's tendency to produce outsized winners. But there has been no comparably global shorthand for the anxiety prompted by capitalism's losers—until now. Muslim refugees help give a name, Islam, to the masses seemingly encroaching from the margins of the world system. The result, I argue, is the hardening of Islamophobia and antisemitism into the inextricable poles of a reactionary worldview. Taking France as a case study, the article reads the burkini bans prompted by the July 2016 terror attack in Nice as an expression of middle-class fear about downward mobility. Targeted at both internal Muslim leisure and external Muslim encroachment, the bans evoke how European unease about globalization increasingly takes Islamophobic form. Such intolerance threatens not only to lodge Islamophobia at the heart of a reconstituted Europe but also to erode the vigilance against antisemitism once characteristic of the postwar European project.

Wyndham Lewis’ short story ‘Cantleman's Spring-Mate’ (1917) remains one of the minor side-attractions of modernist obscenity, seldom discussed in terms other than those that would present it as a negligible rehearsal for the more consequential trials and ordeals of Ulysses (1922). This article responds to this oversight by comparing representations of animality in Lewis’ story with the early popular essays of John B. Watson (the ‘father’ of behaviourism). ‘Cantleman's Spring-Mate’ not only thematically links behaviourist assumptions with obscenity considered as a reading practice, but also provides a number of important cues for Lewis’ subsequent critical and satirical engagements with behaviourism in the 1920s and 1930s.

Looking back at the postwar films of Raffaello Matarazzo (specifically, Chains, Tormento, Nobody's Children, and The White Angel), this essay comparatively resituates Italian melodrama in terms of nationally marked conceptions of the popular that help produce an alternative critical perspective onto the period to that offered by neorealism.

Smith’s essays and fiction of the 1930s and 1940s consistently represent the Jim Crow South as a region organized by obscene words that enact racial difference through the dangers said to be presented by particular forms of sexual desire. Just as certain body parts were off-limits to Southern youth, so too were certain groups of people, and Smith’s work from this period comprises an attempt to account for the ways in which sin, sex, and segregation mutually reproduced and overdetermined the efficacy of the social, cultural, and political institutions of the region.

This comparative historical study explores the broad sociocultural factors at play in the relationships among U.S. obscenity laws and literary modernism and naturalism in the early twentieth century. Putting obscenity case law’s crisis of legitimation and modernism’s crisis of representation into dialogue, Erik Bachman shows how obscenity trials and other attempts to suppress allegedly vulgar writing in the United States affected a wide-ranging debate about the power of the printed word to incite emotion and shape behavior.

Far from seeking simply to transgress cultural norms or sexual boundaries, Bachman argues, proscribed authors such as Wyndham Lewis, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, and James T. Farrell refigured the capacity of writing to evoke the obscene so that readers might become aware of the social processes by which they were being turned into mass consumers, voyeurs, and racialized subjects. Through such efforts, these writers participated in debates about the libidinal efficacy of language with a range of contemporaries, from behavioral psychologists and advertising executives to book cover illustrators, magazine publishers, civil rights activists, and judges.

Focusing on case law and the social circumstances informing it, Literary Obscenities provides an alternative conceptual framework for understanding obscenity’s subjugation of human bodies, desires, and identities to abstract social forces. It will appeal especially to scholars of American literature, American studies, and U.S. legal history.