Tag: Turkey
-
Poetic Emancipation: The Political Verse of Nûredîn Zaza
In this blog post, I explore the history of a small booklet of Kurdish poetry about the struggle of the PDK for Kurdish self-determination, tracking out its contributors and likely place of production.
-
Anatolian Memories
A look at memories and memorializations of multiethnic Anatolia through a variety of memoirs and fiction works.
-
Promising Freedom: Cold War Albanian Papers in Istanbul
In this blog post, I explore the exile Albanian newspaper Besa, appearing in Istanbul from 1953 to the 1970s, and its relationship to broader Albanian cultural production in the country.
-
Flipping pages: an Overview of Kurdish Periodical Culture
An look at the British Library’s Kurdish periodical collection, with a contextualization of the holdings, and copious links to help those interested find research about periodicals in the various Kurdish languages and dialects.
-
Märjani and Lebib: The Struggles of a Jurist and his Lonely Publisher
A close look at a biography of Shihabetdin Märjani written in Tatar and published in Turkey in the 1960s, with particular attention paid to socio-political context and language.
-
Two Sides of the Black Sea: Ukrainian Advocacy in the Ottoman Empire
On occasion, old books can have oddly prescient titles. Ukrayna, Rusya, Türkiye: Makaleler Mecmuası is one such book. I came across it during one of my usual cataloguing sweeps, and thought that I’d shelve it somewhere in my memory. And that’s where that knowledge has lived for the last few years. But since Russia invaded…
-
Publishing the Diaspora: North Caucasian Periodicals in Turkey
An exploration of periodicals published by the North Caucasian diaspora in Turkey over the latter half of the 20th century, with a particular view towards activist networks and expressions of identity.
-
Not Your Stereotype: Laz Written Expression in Turkey
A few months ago, I wrote about a small-run personal history of the town of Azakh written in the Azakheni dialect of Arabic. In the preamble, I mentioned that there are a whole host of ethnicities resident in Turkey lacking official recognition or support for cultural autonomy. Despite such administrative inertia, the names and customs…
-
The Historicity of the Mundane: Turkish Periodicals from the 1930s
What the ephemera of the everyday gives us is how ordinary people lived through such changes; how they saw them reflected in themselves, and how they, in turn, saw themselves reflected or erased in new ideals.