Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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the Turkish Republic’s unrelenting de-Ottomanization of Istanbul, involving both the regularization of Istanbul through modernist planning, and its Turkification policies targeting its non-Muslim residents for expulsion. Another was the tremendous expansion of the city after the 1950s through rural-urban migration, and the burgeoning of the city’s shantytowns (gecekondu), which became key theaters and crucibles of political conflict. According to Setha Low, “An ethnographic approach to the study of urban space includ[es] four areas of spatial/cultural analysis—historical emergence, sociopolitical and economic structuring, patterns of social use, and [its] experiential meanings” (1996: 400). I distribute discussion of these to various parts of the study, and areas one and two to chapter 3 in particular. In short, what was Istanbul like in 1974, and how did it get to be like that?
Chapters 4 and 5 explore activists’ own production of space in Istanbul. To do so I disaggregate from partisans’ narratives four major modes of politico-spatial practice, including their visual politics, their sonic politics, their occupation of space, and their performance of violence. Chapter 4 concludes by analyzing the content and meaning of factions’ obituaries, and of statements from bereaved families for killed activists published in their newspapers or journals. Chapter 5 continues this exploration of activists’ constitution of the city but arrows in on the political and ethical engagements of militant groups in three particular arenas in Istanbul’s urban geography: in squatter settlements; in factories and workplaces; and in municipalities. Ideological activism in shantytowns, labor activism in factories and unions, and urban activism in Councils were core aspects of one single but bitterly factionalized revolutionary movement. This “interconnectedness” of the sprawling revolutionary enterprise is particularly important given junta claims that their intervention was necessitated by the “terrorism” of activists. Most groups did not pursue armed struggle.
Conflicts between militants, factions, ideologies, and ideologists revolved around two inseparable concerns: in order to make a revolution, what is our situation, and how is this to be done? Chapter 6 attends to a single broad theme with at least two dimensions—activists’ perceptions of their factions, and of their factions’ ideologies. The chapter moves back and forth between two foci: description of how partisans (personally and collectively) constituted or applied ideologies, and exploration of how the political/spatial actions, experiences, and decisions of militants were guided by the varied historical narratives, political claims, and economic models of leftist and rightist ideologies.
Coup d’état! Chapter 7 concentrates on three temporally experienced and interrelated themes. The first describes the junta’s immediate spatial and activist politics after the military insurrection, embarked upon to punish militants and to intimidate and pacify the city. The second involves investigation of activists’ responses to this assault on Istanbul’s urban bodies and places. The third section presents the junta’s legal and institutional reconstruction of Turkish society, intended to drastically and permanently reorganize its political practices. Taken together the themes chronicle Istanbul’s shock entry into a reign of fascism and its preparation for a new authoritarian political and neoliberal economic order. Chapter 8 concludes Istanbul, City of the Fearless by describing some of the ways that ex-activists and others in the present continue to reckon with the meaning of those events. In particular, it shows how acts of urban commemoration by leftist political parties, unions, and civil society groups communicate to younger generations both the aims of their struggle and the losses accruing to its participants.
The following chapter more directly addresses the phenomenological approach that orients the book’s spatial analysis of the city. It affirms that at the crux of a phenomenological account of social life lies the matter of individual perception in any or all of its dimensions—corporeal, interactional, cultivated, political, and collective (Bachelard 1994, Casey 1996, Duranti 2009, Ram and Houston 2015). As people’s orientations to the world change—say, by their living through a significant historical event such as the spatial convulsions wrought by urban militancy, or by a diminution of their bodily capacities by torture—so also do different properties of places, situations, emotions and people, once at the margins of noticing, come into focus. A phenomenological perspective illuminates a number of key social processes germane to understanding Istanbul in those years: activism and its modification of place perception; militants’ frictional fashioning of the affordances of the urban environment; the power of inhabited places through their spatial furnishment by others; songs’, bodies’, places’ and things’ holding of militants’ memories; and the contemporary politics impinging upon the forgetting and remembering of 1970s activism. In doing so Istanbul, City of the Fearless presents not only a social history but also a phenomenological study of political memory and commemoration in the present.
1. I have changed the names of activists, but not the political faction they belonged too, nor their gender. The first time I mention the name of a political group or faction I translate it into English. Thereafter I use the Turkish abbreviation. See the list of names of political organizations.
2. I use activist, militant, and partisan interchangeably in this book to refer to the active members of different political factions.
3. According to Zürcher (1995) in the year before the coup up to twenty people a day were slain in urban conflict.
4. There is an issue with the nomenclature used by protagonists to describe combatants in the political struggle in these years. Fascist is the word used by leftist groups to describe the commandos they were confronted by. The rightists called themselves “idealists,” inspired by the ideals (ülküler) or principles of Turkism. Similarly, the Ülkücü labeled all leftist groups “communists,” despite profound differences between them.
5. Let me give two examples, each from the volume Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe (2010). Çağlar Keyder begins his narrative with a single paragraph on peasant modernization through urban migration to Istanbul in the 1960s and 70s, before proclaiming how “all this changed when Istanbul, in common with other globalizing cities of the Third World after the 1980s, experienced the shock of rapid integration into transnational markets and witnessed the emergence of a new axis of stratification” (2010: 26). Göktürk, Soysal and Türeli’s introduction ignores the 1970s while claiming that “a new phase of urban restructuring begins with economic liberalization in the 1980s” (2010: 3).
6. See the title Bizim çocuklar yapamadı (Our children couldn’t do it) (Mavioğlu 2008), which in retelling the story of 12 Eylül and its aftermath echoes the reported words of the American consul in Ankara to the State Department on the night of the coup: “Our boys have done it.”
7. Kenan Evren specifically mentioned the Konya rally in his address to the press, September 16 1980, citing it as an example of the dangerous publicization of “reactionary” beliefs (2000: 23).
8. Cf. Bachelard: “The house we were born in is an inhabited house” (1994: 14).
9. For example, see the often short lived (and now fading) archived journals of different political factions that analyzed social conditions in the years leading up to the coup and pronounced on both the current situation and the revolutionary strategy or tactics to overcome it.
2
Activism, Perception, Memory
12 Eylül Museum of Shame
The source of much of the key material analyzed in this book lies in the poetic descriptions of Istanbul’s terrors and transformations communicated by ex-militants in extensive interviews. Given that 1970s activism and the coup occurred decades ago, I played particular attention in interviews to questions about activists’ present-day remembering. Although heavily reliant upon those accounts, in this chapter I move back and forth between more and less subjective analytic discussion, seeking to distil from the experiences of individual partisans key social practices germane to understanding the city in those years.
The theoretical and methodological perspective