THE STATE THEATER IN TURKISH NATION BUILDING: POSITIONING THE SELF IN THE HISTORY THROUGH TRANSLATION SCREENPLAYS

The proclamation of the Republic in Turkey accelerated the modernization process including a cultural mobilization. Turkey took Europe as the role model for its modernization and nation building process. One of the prominent institutions that’d been used as the nation’s global showcase during the convergence to the West block after World War Two, was the State Theater. The State Theater was founded in 1949 during the transition to the democracy with a shift to a multi-party regime. The repertory of the institution reflects the projects of identity and nation building in cultural aspects through the dramaturgists’ preferences of translation screenplays until the first military intervention in 1960. The research aims at revealing the role of the State Theater in Turkish identity building process, adressing the perception of “West” through translations that were put onto the stage between 1949-1960. The main object of this study is to unravel the perception of “Western history” and self positioning of the Turkish identity in it. The study argues that the self positioning of modern Turkish identity relies against “Western” and “European” as “the other” identity historically and it is traceable through the State Theater’s translation repertory under the history theme. The study uses discourse analysis mapping the translation screenplays of the State Theater to ascertain the self-positioning of Turkish identity