POLI 275 - Anatolian Struggles

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This class offers a hermeneutical engagement with selected literature, film, and folk music associated with struggle against illegitimate power in contemporary Turkey/Türkiye. The concept, ‘struggle’ (uğraşma, in Turkish), comes from a dialogue between characters in Yaşar Kemal’s epic tale, İnce Memed (Memed, My Hawk, 1955), as they converse about variously suffering and confronting ongoing forms of severe harm and violence. Class considerations about different possible forms of life meaningfully associated with ‘struggle’ initiates extensive conversation with other class materials about varied practices of ‘Anatolian’ political struggle in the context of poignantly persisting injustices, also of various kinds. A non-naïve, post-Orientalist approach to questions of power and interpretative encounter guides the study. Materials include: writings by Yaşar Kemal, Nazım Hikmet, and Latife Tekin, films by Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Özcan Alper, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and poetic türkü music of the Anatolian aşık tradition. Andrew Davison.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS