On May 12, CMES researcher Torsten Janson participated in the conference Smyrna as Symbol: From the 19th Century to September 1922 at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens on a panel about Smyrna. Torsten presented the paper "Overwriting Smyrna: Urban imaginaries in Turkish-nationalist commemoration".
Abstract
Despite its importance for the establishment of modern Turkey, İzmir remains understudied in scholarship on Turkish nationalism. This paper presents data from the project Beyond Sacred/Secular Cities, studying urban imaginaries in contemporary Middle Eastern nationalisms. With a point of departure in theories of memory (Connerton 1989), postsecularism (Asad 2018), and social construction of space (Lefevbre 1991), the project explores cities as concomitant socio-spatial stages and symbolic-narrative resources (Çınar & Bender 2007), for the construction and contest of nationalism. Focusing local-urban historiography and commemorative-performative practice (rather than state-centrist discourse), the project probes the entangled symbolic universes comprising political imaginaries, beyond dichotomies such as sacred/secular and traditional/modern (Eickelman & Piscatori 1996). The present paper presents fieldwork from the cultural-commemorative events organized for the 2022 centenary of the (proto)Turkish conquest of Smyrna. It explores the historiographic narratives and textual/visual/spatial representations of commemorative exhibitions, film screenings, and architectural projects. Ranging from amnesia to convoluted detail; from dramatic orchestration to meticulous documentation; from sanguine festivity to victimhood, the narratives are guided by affective overtones, yet avoid direct engagement with questions of culpability. In effect, traumatic Smyrna is overwritten with triumphant İzmir: an urban autobiography coextensive with the nascent Republic, symbolic of socio-economic restoration and local-cultural enterprise.
Watch a recording of the event here (Torsten's presentation starts at 3:25:00)
Bibliography
Asad, Talal (2018). Secular Translations: Nation-state, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. New York: Columbia University Press.
Çınar, Alev and Thomas Bender (2007). ‘The City: Experience, Imagination, and Place’. In Alev Çınar and Thomas Bender (Eds.), Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, pp. xi-xxvi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Connerton, Paul (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eickelman, Dale F. and James Piscatori (1996). Muslim Politics. Woodstock: Princeton University Press.
Lefebvre, Henry (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell
