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This study examines the Eurovision stage as a cultural space that cultivated an affective-discursive terrain forging Turkish national identity. It draws upon the media texts as a heuristic to examine how an image of 'Turkishness' was created and negotiated. Focusing in particular on four specific cases (Semiha Yankı in 1975, Çetin Alp in 1983, Şebnem Paker in 1997 and Sertab Erener in 2003), this study suggests that the Eurovision stage was a space where 'Turkishness' encountered an imagined 'Europeanness'. In these cases, affective discourses gave meanings of national allegories of 'Turkishness' to performing bodies on the Eurovision stage. The affective registers generated a discursive formation shaping the contours of 'Turkishness' in relation to Europe. Yet these discourses did not generate fixed and stable meanings. In particular, the construction of national success was negotiated and contested in terms of the appropriateness of the national embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Middle Eastern populations outside Israel have not been represented in Western-based international human genome sequencing efforts. In response, national-level projects have emerged throughout the Middle East to decode the Arab, Turkish and Iranian genomes. The discourses surrounding the ‘national genome’ that shape scientists’ representation of their work to local and international audiences evoke three intersecting analytics of nationalism: methodological, postcolonial and diasporic. Methodologically, ongoing human genome projects in Turkey and Iran follow the population logics of other national and international genome projects, for example justifying research with reference to projected health benefits to their fellow citizens. Meanwhile, assumptions about and representations of ethnicity and diversity are deeply inflected by local histories of scientific development and nationalist politics. While Iranian geneticists have transformed this paradigm to catalog national genetic diversity through a discourse of ‘Iranian ethnicities’, Turkish geneticists remain politically constrained from acknowledging ethnic diversity and struggle to distance their work from racialized narratives of Turkish national identity. Such nationally-framed narratives of genomic diversity are not confined to their original contexts, but travel abroad, as demonstrated by a US-based genome project that articulates a form of Iranian-American diasporic nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey’s Islamist-rooted Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) aggressively pursued European Union accession as a primary pillar of foreign policy, only to swing sharply away from the West in subsequent years. Actor- and party-based Islamist identity approaches cannot account for Turkey’s initial European Union-centric orientation, while domestic politics and economic arguments fail to explain the timing of the shift eastward and its domestic repercussions. Examining the advantages that foreign policy offers as an alternative arena in which elites can politicize identity debates helps to distill this complexity. This article argues that elites choose to take their national identity contests to the foreign policy arena when identity gambits at the domestic level are blocked. By taking its pursuit of hegemony for Ottoman Islamism “outside” through aggressive European Union accession measures, the Justice and Development Party could weaken domestic challengers supporting a competing, Republican Nationalist proposal for identity, and broaden support for Ottoman Islamism at home. The theory of identity hegemony developed here thus explains the counter-intuitive finding that Turkey’s European Union-oriented policy helped make possible the rise of Ottoman Islamism. Turkey offers an ideal empirical window onto these dynamics because of recent and dramatic shifts in the dynamics of its public identity debates, and because Turkey’s identity is implicated in multiple international roles, such as North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally, European Union candidate country, Organization of Islamic Cooperation member, and aspirant regional power broker. The framework developed fills a gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity–foreign policy circle, analytically linking the spillover of national identity debates into foreign policy with the changes in the contours of these debates produced by their contestation in this alternative arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is based on the argument that globalism is a product of nationalism. I argue that globalism, understood as the imagination of the world as a single place, was made possible by and accompanies the emergence of nationalism, defined as the formation of an imagined community in a given (local) discursive space. Focusing on the specific ways in which globalism is understood and experienced locally in Turkey, this study examines how the world-at-large is seen from Turkey as part and product of the founding national ideology during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly as expressed in cartoons, and how these visions and images of the globe are produced, mobilized and disseminated locally as part of ongoing nation-building efforts. I argue that during these years the global was invariably imagined as the West, referring mainly to Western Europe, and this imagining was mobilized toward the creation and projection of Turkey as a modern, Western, secular country. I argue that the founding national ideology projected an image of the West as the global-other to be taken as a model and imitated, setting norms for the creation of a new national identity and new norms of citizenship around the principles of secularism, modernity and civilization, which could only be attained by the erasure of the local. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of three major metaphors organizing nationalistic discourse about Cyprus in two online forums for Turkish university students. The analysis suggests that discussants symbolically warranted their constructions of the future of Cyprus and Turkish Cypriots with metaphors of blood and heroism that emphasized their personal and collective memory of sacrifice. Sports metaphors were used predominantly to convey a sense of the strategic importance of Cyprus. In addition, discussants employed gender and sexual metaphors to structure the tension between nationalist feelings associated with motherland Turkey as a pure, virgin female, and the geopolitical demands of the nation-state, portrayed as a father faced with uneasy choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]