Dissertation Information for Howard Lee EissenstatNAME:
DEGREE:
DISCIPLINE:
SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: The limits of imagination: Debating the nation and constructing the state in early Turkish nationalism Abstract: This dissertation examines the struggle of nationalist leaders and intellectuals to create a meaningful and coherent language of political identity in the final years of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic. In so doing, it attempts to demonstrate two basic points. First, nationalists were engaged in a process of uneasy transformation as they attempted to reframe state legitimacy in ways that were both efficacious and "true." The Turkish nationalism that would take shape in the republic was not a preconceived and discrete ideology that won out over rival ideologies such as Islamism and Ottomanism. Rather, the Turkish nationalism of the early republic was the product--though not the culmination--of an on-going process of experimentation that had begun early in the nineteenth century and which continues to this day. Second, this dissertation argues that Turkish nationalism never achieved absolute coherence. From its beginnings, Turkish nationalism was less "a thing" than a discursive field consisting of a range of possibilities, tropes, metaphors, symbols, and narratives which coexisted, interacted, and sometimes ran parallel to each other within the debates and actions of the nationalists themselves. As much as imposing their will on an uncertain and often unwilling populace, the struggle of the nationalists was aimed at reaching some minimal consensus amongst themselves about how to define Turkishness. |
MPACT Scores for Howard Lee EissenstatA = 0 Advisors and Advisees Graphgenerating graph, please reload |
Students under Howard Lee Eissenstat
ADVISEES:
- None
COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None