Is the Turk a white man? : race and modernity in the making of Turkish identity / by Murat Ergin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ergin, Murat, 1977-

Series:

Studies in Critical Social Sciences 95.

Studies in critical social sciences ; v. 95

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnicity--Turkey.

Ethnicity.

Ethnology--Turkey.

Ethnology.

Group identity--Turkey.

Group identity.

Turks--Ethnic identity.

Turks.

Turks--Race identity.

Turkey--Ethnic relations.

Turkey.

Turkey--Race relations.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 pages) : color illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016.

Summary:

In 1909, the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati set out to decide “whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalized as a white person”; the New York Times article on the decision, discussing the question of Turks’ whiteness, was cheekily entitled “Is the Turk a White Man?” Within a few decades, having understood the importance of this question for their modernization efforts, Turkish elites had already started a fantastic scientific mobilization to position the Turks in world history as the generators of Western civilization, the creators of human language, and the forgotten source of white racial stock. In this book, Murat Ergin examines how race figures into Turkish modernization in a process of interaction between global racial discourses and local responses.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Introduction

Why This Book Should Not Have Been Written

The Republican Conversion Narrative

Encounters with the “West”

Race in Early Republican Turkey

Close Encounters and Racial Discourses

Race in Contemporary Turkey

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

90-04-33055-0

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789004330559 DOI