Call for Papers: Culture as a Possibility Space - Vol. 4 No. 3 (2023): October
Freedom expresses and presupposes that everything could have been different, that everything could be understood in a different way.
Isenberg, B. (2012).
Culture in Turkey has become a field where the concept of identity, which the political power has been trying to shape the country for the last 20 years, has the clearest appearance, and policies and practices from censorship to prohibitions, one-handed and top management and populist rhetoric are put into effect for this vision to become the only dominant one. Especially since 2013, when the discourse of the ruling party in the field of culture and its actions are examined, it is possible to see the importance of capturing culture as if it were a fortress which must be conquered.
Culture is built as a field where the words and the signifiers express a single narrative because culture and identity are considered synonymous. Culture will be the identity and mirror of the "New Turkey" to be established, and therefore it must be "designed". There are various “undercurrents” identified by Tanıl Bora (2018) as liberal-conservative, restorationist-conservative and New Right in the vision of “New Turkey” that political power promises to build. These undercurrents with various nuances fed the discourse of “New Turkey” in different ways. They tried to build the cultural substructure of the discourse with various concepts such as “conservative art”. The presidential campaign of Prime Minister Erdogan in 2014 with the title “Yeni Türkiye Yolunda (On the Road to the New Turkey)” revealed the polarizing discourse that started to become prevalent in the cultural field. In the opening speech of the 3rd National Cultural Council held on March 3, 2017, President Erdogan spoke of “being in power” in the field of culture: “Political power can be achieved through elections, votes, ballot boxes; however, for the power of culture, we need a very different kind of accumulation, effort, work, to bruise one’s elbow, to shed a sweat.” Erdogan answered why he wanted to become the only dominant voice in culture in his various speeches: “the mentality that is foreign to his country and nation” was dominant in the field of culture, and this dominance had to be ended, and a “local and national” mentality brought to power.
In this issue of Reflektif, we will include articles presenting cultural and art oases, which examine the titles of authoritarian cultural politics and policies dedicated to making the cultural order of the "New Turkey" of power, which has left its mark on the last twenty years of the country, in the context of the struggle for autonomy of culture and art actors and trying to create an opportunity for independent existence in this climate. All over the country, cultural and artistic actors are in various pursuits to maintain their existence and the free expression of cultural and artistic expression in the public sphere. The cooperative movement developed by private theaters is an important example of these pursuits. We need to meet the readers with works that address the following questions: How do the cultural and artistic actors, who have faced concussions such as the COVID pandemic and economic crisis, and whose vulnerability has increased in the face of all these shocks in the exclusionary and polarizing environment created by the current power's stereotyping, conservative and oppressive cultural policies try to survive? How are they trying to amplify their voices and expand access to arts and culture? How do they defend the rights of art workers? We need to uncover new approaches to the question of what kind of conceptual openings and cultural policy we need for autonomous art to survive in Turkey as an ecosystem open to the world through the production and access channels that will nurture the freedom of cultural expressions. We hope that this compilation contributes to the narrowing of the ground for cultural standardization in our country and the efforts to develop an environment in which multiculturalism, criticism and independent thought, and autonomous art can find an opportunity for free expression following the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005), to which Turkey is also a party.
Issue Editors: Asu Aksoy, Burak Özçetin
Deadline for article submissions: August 20, 2023
