Black to White as Muslim to Jewish: Color Coded Matrix of a Neo-colonial Political Imaginary in Turkey
Lecturer:Prof. Esra Özyürek
Chair: Dr. Tsameret Levi-Daphny
In a country where there are almost no blacks, Jews, or a pre-existing category of whites, many major twenty-first-century politicians claim blackness, accuse others of being Jews or whites, and now also define themselves as better whites. This lecture aims to map the semiotics of the distribution of European racial categories in contemporary Turkish politics as a way of understanding how political actors see or project their place in the Turkish and global political sphere. I suggest that we view the present equation—in which Turkey’s ruling conservative groups affiliate themselves with blacks but at the same time describe themselves as better whites and in opposition to Jews—as a way for the ruling group to understand, reflect, and project a Western/global semiotics of power distribution. These attributes are closely interconnected and together they construct a world image in which blacks and Muslims are together in a fight against whites, Christians, and Jews.
האירוע יתחיל בשעה 18:00