Turkey’s Century : A Contemporary History?

Résumé 0

Though petrified as a national toponym in the 20th century, the name ‘Turkey’ does not belong to one century alone. Many time frames criss-cross it. For one, scholarly versions of nationalist discourse have embedded it in their long durée. Besides, there are polysemic depths to explore that lead to other updating experiments, cutting across history’s foliated time. Emphasis is thus put on contemporaneity, which implies the endorsement of a form of methodical anachronism: the history of Turkey as written in this century cannot be enunciated from this century only. While acknowledging the immobile pose struck by the nation-state, one also needs to account for the lost times which the latter had to make up for. A case in point is what is nowadays being called the ‘deep state’, and the kaleidoscopic geometry of knowledge (between and betwixt eras and areas) that revolves around it.