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Film Screening: “Inside” [Yeralti] (Turkey, Dir. Zeki Demirkubuz, 2012)

Adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel “Notes from Underground”, director Zeki Demirkubuz’s latest film “Yeralti” [Inside] explores a man’s life, thoughts, feelings and his very own darkness. More about the film is available here.

The screening is free and open to the public. Dr. Burcu Karahan (Stanford University) and Dr. Tom Roberts (Stanford University) will lead a discussion session after the screening.

Burcu Karahan is Turkish Language and Literature Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She received her M.A. in Turkish Literature from Bilkent University, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University. Her research focuses on the issues of translation, gender, narcissism, and Westernization in the case of 19^th century Ottoman literature. Her teaching  interests include Ottoman and modern Turkish literatures; translations in late 19th century Turkish Literature; contemporary Turkish Cinema; 18^th and 19^thcentury British and French Novels; decadence, and the novel.

Tom Roberts is Postdoctoral Fellow in Thinking Matters at Stanford University. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University, with a Ph.D. Minor in Religious Studies. His doctoral dissertation examines the aesthetic modalities of transcendence in nineteenth-century Russian fiction, drawing on related topics in Eastern Orthodox art and theology, critical theory, and narratology. Tom is also interested in film studies, and recently completed an article on Ukrainian director Kira Muratova. He is presently preparing his dissertation for book publication, as well as an article on Orthodox liturgical ekphrasis in Leskov and Chekhov. 

[Co-sponsored by CREEES, Turkish Students Association, and thevStanford Arts Institute]

Marie-Pierre Ulloa (Stanford University), “The Maghrebi Diaspora’s Embrace of America: Negotiating North-African & Francophone identities in the U.S.”

Focusing on the Maghrebi Diaspora located in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, this presentation will explore conflicting and coexisting identities and the ways in which the Maghrebi migrants of first and second generations embrace their multiple identities. Through an analysis of the life history narratives of a group of ten first and second generations Maghrebi Californians, this research project aims to provide a more inclusive and complex perspective on the unique interplay between Francophone, North African and American identities, and also to better understand the integration mechanisms as well as the ease and difficulty encountered by the Maghrebi communities in California.

Marie-Pierre Ulloa is Associate Director for Academic Programming and Student Outreach for Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. She also teaches Francophone and North African Cinema and Literature at the Department of French. She received her M.A. in History and Political Science and her Advanced Post-Graduate Diploma in History from Sciences Po in Paris. She is the author of Francis Jeanson, A Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War (Stanford University Press, 2008). Her research interests include French colonialism in the Maghreb, decolonization and politics of memory, history of immigration and diaspora, history and culture of Sephardic Jews, Francophone world, North-African history, and oral history.

[Co-sponsored by the Taube Center for Jewish Studies]

Byzantine and Ottoman Worlds Workshop Series

Nathalie Rothman (University of Toronto), “Translating Empire: Ottomans, Venetians, and Dragomans in Early Modern Istanbul”

Natalie Rothman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, specializing in the history of the Mediterranean in the early modern period. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, and her M.A. in Culture Research from Tel Aviv University. Her book, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2011), explores how diplomatic interpreters, converts, and commercial brokers mediated and helped define political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It received the 2012 Herbert Baxter Adams prize for best first book in European History and the Howard R. Marraro prize for best book in Italian history, both from the American Historical Association. In addition to numerous articles, she continues to examine the history of cultural mediation, the genealogies of Orientalism, and the relationship between translation and empire in her current book project, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Making of the Levant.

[Co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies]

Banu Bargu (The New School), ”Fasting Unto Death: Necropolitical Resistance in Turkey’s Prisons”

One way of writing the history of democracy in Turkey is through the lens of how it treats its dissidents, especially those considered to be “internal threats” to security. While the notoriety of Turkey’s prison practices, especially during “exceptional” times of military takeovers, has often been recognized, the venerable tradition of resistance in Turkey’s prisons built by generations of political prisoners is less known. This paper concentrates on prison resistance and explores the increasingly more collective and corporeal forms of struggle that have emerged in the last three decades. Utilizing the in-depth study of the Death Fast Struggle (2000-2007), conducted by political prisoners of various extra-parliamentary leftist affiliations and sustained through self-destructive practices, including self-starvation, self-immolation, and suicide attacks, I analyze the weaponization of life as an emergent repertoire of political action that resonates with contemporary radical struggles in detention centers around the globe.

Banu Bargu is Assistant Professor of Politics in the Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts at the New School. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Government from Cornell University, and her M.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey). Her research interests are situated at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and anthropology, with a strong regional focus on the Middle East and especially Turkish politics.  Her current research explores the ways in which contemporary violent forms of political action (such as  as hunger strikes, suicide attacks, and self-immolation) relate to the changing nature of sovereign power in the modern world. Her forthcoming book, Starve & Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, focuses on how life is forged into a weapon through an in-depth study of the Death Fast Struggle of political prisoners in Turkey. Among her recent publications are “Human Shields” (Contemporary Political Theory, 2013), “In the Theater of Politics: Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism and Aesthetics” (diacritics, 2012), “Unleashing the Acheron: Sacrificial Partisanship, Sovereignty, and History” (theory & event, 2010), and “Spectacles of Death: Dignity, Dissent, and Sacrifice in Turkey’s Prisons” ( in L. Khalili & J. Schwedler (eds.) Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion, Columbia University Press, 2010).

[Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, and Turkish Students Association]

Orhan Tekelioğlu (Bahçeşehir University), ““Migrant Tastes and Formation of Popular Culture: The Case of Turkey”

Abstract: In societies with continuous in-and-out migration in relatively short periods the formation of dominant culture comes into shape as “popular”. Continental theories for defining people’s culture mostly assume some permanent structures (cultural preferences of elites or classes) in modern societies, yet not so successful for explaining the rise of popular cultures in societies like the USA. Turkey, as a country of migratory waves from its birth, is a pristine example of such a process and unique for its elites’ interventions into the cultural sphere. The talk is broadly concerns with three dynamics on the formation of Turkish popular culture – demographic transition, elitist cultural policies, and partly oppositional character of people’s taste.

Orhan Tekelioğlu is Chair of Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University (Istanbul, Turkey) and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennyslvania’s Annenberg School of Communication.  He is a scholar of cultural sociology including such research fields as media consumption, the history of Turkish popular music, the sociological features of Turkish literature, and the cultural politics of the Republican period. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the Middle Eastern Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) and his Magisterartium degree in Sociology from the University of Oslo. He taughted in Departments of Political Science and Turkish Literature at the Bilkent University in Ankara, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, and acted as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Communication at the Izmir University of Economics. Dr. Tekelioğlu conducts field studies on popular television dramas and reality shows, and history of jazz and popular music in Istanbul. He has published articles in Turkish and in English and submitted papers to numerous national and international congresses. Among his publications are Pop Ekran [Pop Screen, 2013],  Pop Yazılar, [Pop Essays, 2006], Foucault Sosyolojisi [Sociology of Foucault, 2003], Şerif Mardin’e Armağan, [A Festschrift for Şerif Mardin, 2005), Modernizing reforms and Turkish music in the 1930s  (Turkish Studies, 2001), and “Two Incompatible Positions in the Challenge Against the Individual Subject of Modernity” (Theory& Psychology, 1997).

[Co-sponsored by the Program on Urban Studies, the Europe Center, and Turkish Students Association]

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Ozlem Altan-Olcay (Koc University), “Getting into form: Tensions of Class and Development”

Abstract: In the recent decades, the global development paradigm has paid increasing attention to issues of gender equality as part of economic development initiatives. To this end, programs that push for women’s gainful economic activities have become popular among development actors across the world. Critiques of these programs have drawn attention to their role in the diffusion of particular economic logics. This paper engages with this discussion, by focusing on the activity of form filling and reporting as a mediator of the relationship between the civil society actors and the beneficiaries of the programs. It is based on fieldwork conducted in two civil society associations in Turkey, whose programs, run in collaboration with a network of private sector funders, international institutions and the government, encourage women to start their own businesses. I argue the following: the designs of the forms that various participants fill out, the networks in which the forms are transmitted, and the authority arrangements they assume are more than mechanisms of data collection. Class tensions that emerge between civil society actors who design the forms and the beneficiaries who are expected to fill them out reflect the difficulties in the diffusion of neoliberal subjectivities. However, when a third set of actors, the international funders, are introduced into the scene, the field workers’ relative vulnerability and proximity to the beneficiaries cause them to take on this activity with zeal and convince women to follow suit. The volume of the activity of reporting and form filling ends up being large enough to become the real thing, rather than a representation of what the actors actually do. The widespread practice contributes to the reproduction of particular logics and subjectivities, including calculative capacity, market success, and gendered familial roles among others.

Ozlem Altan-Olcay is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Koc University (Istanbul, Turkey). She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from New York University. Her teaching and research interests include globalization, gender, political economy within the context of the Middle East. Among her publications are “Gendered Projects of National Identity Formation: The Case of Turkey” (National Identities, 2009), “Defining ‘America’ from a Distance: Local Strategies of the Global in the Middle East” (Middle Eastern Studies, 2008), and “Makan: The Right to the City and New Ways of Understanding Space” (Arab Studies Journal, 2006).

[Co-sponsored by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Stanford Turkish Student Association]