Artun Ozguner

This study aims to understand the role of spatial practices in the representation of nation-state in Turkey, and its commemoration in print between 1908 and the 1950s. Encompassing three major phases in Turkish history (the proto-nationalist revolution of 1908, the republican nation-building after WWI and the neo-traditionalist tendencies of the late 1940s) the period studied is testimony to a major shift from an empire to a modern nation-state.

Political historians’ accounts of state culture in the period often emphasise the role of a top-down transformation in politics in accompanying the arrival of republican culture. This thesis argues that when observed through transformation in print culture and the gradual nationalisation of the cosmopolitan network of designers and publishers, the period accommodated a more disparate use of modernism than the monolithic tone political history often suggests.

The study focuses on spatial practices and print culture, specifically the redefinition of the spatial memory landscape through the construction of monuments and the production of commemorative events, along with attempts to diffuse these as a cohesive narrative through print media. Print culture affords the permeation of ideas through printed journals, newspapers, postcards, stamps and money bills. At the same time, the very materiality of these artefacts and the monuments themselves reveals tensions between the politics, resources and technologies at hand. A close attention to the use and reception of monuments, public events and their representation in print also demonstrates how nationalism operates by appropriating some inherited legacies while disavowing others. The research shows how such amnesia was evident both in the practices of Young Turk modernisers in the turn of the century from 1908 to1923 and their Republican successors from the early 1920s to the 1950s, as design was approached as a material tool for the self-assertion of national modernity first in Young Turk proto-nationalism, then in the Republican elite’s endeavours to construe things as national. It argues that both regimes employed similar commemorative practices within the existing memory landscape, for the claim of different legitimacies.