The Question of Ottoman Legacy in the

Westernizing Turkey

In the Eurovision Song Contest 2003, Sertab Erener, the

entrant for Turkey, was the winner of the event with the

song “Every Way that I Can” whose clip depicts a concubine

in the Ottoman Imperial harem.1 The Eurovision Song Contest

is an annual competition held between “active member

countries of the ‘European Broadcasting Union’ (EBU), in

which participating countries each submit a song to be

performed on live television; then proceed to cast votes for

the other countries' songs, in order to find the most

popular song in the competition.”2 According to the

contest’s format, each country participates via one of their

national EBU-member television stations, whose task it is to

select a singer and a song to represent the country in the

international competition.

Beginning in 1975, the year Turkey decided to

participate in the Eurovision song contest, the songs that

1 For the video, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6842553609067398921&q=sertab+erener2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest

1

would represent Turkey on the international level, were

selected by public vote. Nevertheless, these

“democratically” decided songs could not achieve a

significant success in the international contest. In 2002,

the recently elected neo-Islamic government changed the

policy of public voting, and assigned the Ministry of

Culture to choose the singer and the song. Besides, it is

assumed that the failures of Turkey in the contest were

because the songs were in Turkish and thus, declared English

as the language of the song. Finally, the government

nominated Sertab Erener and her English song, “Every Way

That I Can” as the representative for Turkey.

After the “victory in the European battlefield”, the

neo-Islamic government was celebrated as it rejuvenated

Turkish people’s suppressed hopes “to be recognized in a

European community” and “re-affirmed Turks’ strength and

virility to the arrogant Europeans.” Since the winner is

chosen by the public votes from other “European” countries,

the Turkish people interpreted this achievement as the

implicit affirmation of Europeans to finally regard Turkey

2

as “European”. Ambivalently they considered this victory as

proof of Turkey’s culturally and artistically distinguished

quality among European countries. In an attempt to restore

its “self” image in any “European” platform, Turkey regarded

this contest as a ground to prove itself as culturally

“authentic” but “equally modern” nation. It is evident that

Eurovision Song Contest was not regarded as a typical

entertainment event. Instead it was a political

confrontation which should be investigated within the

broader context of Turkey’s political agenda that is

determined by the dynamics of its long-aspired and long-

denied European Union membership.

Indeed, the political interpretations of the contest

and also the ambivalent reactions to the victory,

illustrates the contradictions of Turkey’s perception of the

West. In addition, it reflects the fluctuations and

contradictions of the whole Westernization project

prevailing in late Ottoman history and the history of

Turkey. In other words, this story of Eurovision also speaks

to a specific discourse about the Westernization of a

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country which is systematically coded as “non-western”.

Therefore the symbolic meaning of this contest is crucial to

comprehend the contradictions and ambivalences of the

project and the process of Turkish modernity that marked the

late Ottoman period and modern Turkish history.

In addition to the role of the perceptions of West in

Turkish modernization process, the interpretations of

Ottoman legacy is one of the controversial topics in the

construction of a national identity. In the process of

constructing an authentic national identity which is

distinguished from the West, the relationship to the Ottoman

past is highly problematized in Turkey’s history. Depending

on the degree of the affinity towards Western Europe, the

cultural and historical ties to the Ottoman Empire are

either deliberately denied, as happened in the early modern

Turkey, or the Ottoman Islamic legacy is nostalgically

adopted as the sole ground of national identity, as occurred

after 1980 with the Islamic revival. Nevertheless, the

election of the neo-Islamic government marked the beginning

of an even more complex structure in terms of national

4

identity, constructed through the imaginations of an Ottoman

past and a European future.

This new national discourse embodied by the recently

elected neo-Islamic government made its first public

appearance through the imagery and the content of the song

that represents Turkey in the Eurovision song contest.

Therefore, the discourse conveyed through this song and its

video clip is a primary topic of this analysis. First,

however, an analysis of the ambivalent logic common to the

modernist and nationalist discourses of the late Ottoman and

contemporary modernization processes and projects in Turkey

should be explored. Later, in order to give the nuanced

portrayal of this long process, I will concentrate on the

different time periods in the history of modern Turkey that

are peculiarized by their disparate attitudes towards

Western ideals and Ottoman legacy. Observing that these

nuanced nationalist and modernist discourses similarly

considered the ideals of “woman” as manifestations of these

diverse visions of identity, I will focus on women as the

subject of analysis. Particularly the images of women in the

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song representing Turkey in the Eurovision will be

investigated in order to apprehend the role of Ottoman

legacy in current Turkey’s identity politics.

Westernization Project, Modernist Discourse and the Inescapable

Ambivalence

Profound exchanges between cultures occurred in the

18th and especially in the 19th century as the needs of

Europe’s industrializing economies and the continent’s

concomitant political and social instability, led to the

inexorable expansion towards ‘its east’. Europe’s interest

was especially focused on the particular parts of the East,

mainly Egypt, modern Turkey, Syria, and Arabia which were,

at that time, Ottoman territories. In a short time, European

interest in the extension of Europe’s political and cultural

presence and the substantiation of its economic and military

dominance in these territories, intensified.

These fundamental changes in the dynamics of power

also urgently necessitated a certain kind of cultural

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awareness both for Europeans who aspired to dominate and for

Ottomans who were experiencing mounting political

difficulties, military defeats, and economic problems. In

effect, this process had fundamental ideological impact on

these culture’s self perception and identity constructions.

The territorial, geographical and cultural differences

between the eastern and the western parts of the world were

constructed into ‘epistemological and ontological

distinction as ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ or as ‘the Orient’

and ‘the Occident’.3 For European dominant ideology and its

Orientalist discursive economy, this distinction between the

East and the West was self-evident through the inferior

manners within which the non-European subject acted, spoke

and thought that were ultimately opposite to the superior

European subject. On the other hand, the perception of

European “other” and the construction of the Ottoman “self”

involve a very intrigue, multilayered and even inherently

contradictory process. The epistemological division of the

East and the West and also the conceptual and descriptive

3 See Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978, p.2

7

baggage of these Orientalist binaries -- within which the

East is marked through its “lack” in relation to the West --

is regarded as valid to a certain extend by the Ottomans and

also later by the modernizing elites of the Turkish

Republic. This discursive homology between Orientalism and

the Ottoman-Turkish modernization project is critical in

apprehending the modernizer’s aspiration to become modern

and achieve the “valued” “superior” qualities of the modern

West. In other words, the initial motive for the

Westernization project implicitly verifies the Orientalist

construction of non-European Ottomans-Turks as backward and

underdeveloped. On the other hand, the concept of the East

as subordinate, periphery, and/or inferior partner of the

West is simultaneously deconstructed during this

“Europeanization” process. Instead, an autonomous,

authentic, pure and uncontaminated origin is systematically

asserted in the course of constructing a national Ottoman-

Turkish identity.

The ambivalences in the reactions to the West should be

apprehended within the frame of the paradoxical acceptance

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and refutation of the epistemic and moral dominance of the

West. In the attempt to transform non-European ‘other’ into

Eastern ‘self’, modernist discourses sustained Orientalist

episteme that coded the West as “self” on the basis of its

material superiority. Within this framework, the Turkish -

Ottoman superior “self” is achieved as far as it

approximates the technological and progressive qualities of

the Western self. Nevertheless, the adoption of the Western

self should be limited only to the imitation of its material

supremacy whereas the authentic essence and higher morality

of the Ottoman-Turkish ‘self’ must remain ‘uncontaminated’

by the Western moral decadence. On the one hand, the West is

a positive “other” whose qualities should be adopted by the

insufficient Turkish – Ottoman “self”. On the other hand,

the West is inherently sustained as the negative “other” who

signifies a certain degree of degeneration, corruption and

threat. This attitude and perception have been manifested in

the whole “Europeanization” project and also in theorizing

and narrating the cultural and historical connection to

Ottoman Empire, in the Turkish Republic.

9

In spite of this methodological homology in the

modernist discourses, the answers for a culturally authentic

“self” create significant heterogeneity in the course of

modernization process in Turkey. More than the extent of

accommodating Western “other” into Turkish “self”, the

degree to which there is an acknowledgment of the Ottoman

legacy in the authentic national identity, problematizes a

straight and homogenous development of the modernization

process. The disequilibrium between mapping and denying the

cultural, geographical, and historical continuity between

Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic, characterizes the

contradistinctions of modernity in Turkey.

Turkish Modernization

The tensions between alaturka and alafranka cultural

forms --which respectively refers to the Ottoman-Turkish and

European “frankish” styles —lies at the heart of an on-going

debate over the possibilities of complex historical

processes of transformation from a feudal empire into a

nation state. Moreover, it is crucial for the efforts of

crafting the Turkish national identity – an identity into

10

which the tensions between the traditional and the modern

were easily integrated.

In spite of Turkey’s ambiguous attitude towards the

Ottoman legacy, the modernization process of Turkey cannot

be explained without understanding the motives and dynamics

of modernization in Ottoman Empire that officially started

with Tanzimat. The period of Ottoman reforms were started by

the Tanzimat movement in the early nineteenth century, and

then institutionalized, mainly by the Young Turks, during

the early twentieth century. As Kandiyoti observes, Ottoman

reformists “were influenced by European ideas of nationalism

and liberalism, which they attempted to incorporate into an

Islamic theory of state and legitimacy. They also adopted a

contradictory stand vis-à-vis the idea of progress, on one

hand praising abstract ‘progress’ and the material advances

of Europe and on the other hand looking back wistfully on

the harmoniousness of an imaginary, ideal Islamic state.”4

4 See Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Some Awkard Questions on Women and Modernity inTurkey” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Lila Abu-Lughod ed. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 273

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The “woman question” appeared in the public political

discourse of the Ottoman Empire and served as a vocabulary

to debate questions of cultural integrity and national

identity. The essential features of the debate concerning

women were inspired by the questions and concerns that

shaped the nationalist discourse. Issues like family,

responsible motherhood, and the education of the citizens

were all discussed as parts of the “woman question” by the

reformist discourse whose primary and common concern was to

save the declining empire. Throughout the reform period,

debates on women and the family were at the heart of

political and ideological concerns to devise recipes for

salvaging the threatened empire.

The modernists defined women mainly as mothers and

wives who can play a crucial role in restoring power as a

nation. Therefore, women’s education and thus emancipation

were strongly argued. Alongside this, “excessive”

Westernization was perpetually criticized. In other words,

despite the desire to Westernize, and modernize the Ottoman

nation, there was perennial concern with the limits of

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Westernization. Therefore, Westernization needed to be

implemented without really eroding women’s place in the home

and undermining the moral and spiritual values of the

family. As a result, women were rendered as sites of

manifestation and contestation of a modernizing project

which aimed to protect the overall moral fabric of society

while being westernized. Ottoman elites regarded changing

the status of women as crucial to change the nation as a

whole, particularly because of women’s enormous

responsibility in the domestic sphere as wives and as

mothers who were “rearing and training the children, the

future citizens of the modern nation.”5

Idealized Europe and Exterminated Ottoman: Building Nation-State and

National Identity in the early period of Turkish Republic

Tanzimat policies in the mid-nineteenth century and the

later efforts of the Young Turks, primarily aimed toward

modernizing the superstructure of the state and some of its

institutions while leaving the traditional values and

5 See, Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions”in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Lila Abu-Lughod ed. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press, 1998, p.9

13

manners intact. With the establishment of the Republic of

Turkey with the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk at the

end of World War I, the extent of already existing

preoccupation with Europeanization was intensified and

broadened. Secular modernization became the official

ideology and simultaneously, the degree to which one was

civilized was measured according to the ability for them to

conform to Western social and intellectual codes.

Westernization was associated with progress which was

identified with breaking away from Ottoman backwardness and

Islam.

The Republic of Turkey was established as a nation-

state out of the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire.

However, for the establishment of different political

organizations and regimes, a new and rather alien idea of

statehood had to be implemented into a population that until

then thought of itself as subjects of the sultan, who as

caliph was also the accepted spiritual leader of the

community of Muslims. Thus along with building the Turkish

nation-state, the Turkish nation as such had to be created.

14

People had to be given a new collective identity, and they

had to be persuaded to accept it. The Kemalist revolution

had to establish the Turkish republic in tandem with the

Turkish people as a nation, and Turks as citizens with an

identity other than that of Muslim subject of the sultan. In

this respect, he regarded Islam as the major impediment to

establish a new national identity and reach “the desired

level of contemporary civilization” 6 on the path to

Westernization. Thus, abolishing the religious foundations

of the state and eradicating most of the cultural symbols by

which these foundations were expressed in everyday life were

crucial steps. The abolition of the caliphate in 1924 which

had a great impact was followed by the abolition of the

office of the seyh’ul Islam, the shar’ia courts, the

medrese, all of which were centers of religious instruction

and learning. The ban on the activities of the religious

orders (tarikat) in 1925, which formed the backbone of folk

Islam in the rural Anatolia, discouraging veils for women,

replacing Arabic script with European Latin script, and

6 The term in Turkish is “Muassir milletler seviyesine ulasmak”

15

substituting the Georgian calendar for the Muslim calendar,

constituted the establishment of a radical new cultural

framework for citizens of the new republic. This cultural

transformation was accompanied by the adoption of new legal

foundations for conducting social and economic life: a new

constitution, civil code, and commercial law, all of which

were borrowed from Europe. “Taken as a whole, these reforms

aimed at destroying the symbols of Ottoman-Islamic

civilization and substituting them with their western

counterparts”7 An irony of history is that the Turks, who

for centuries symbolized barbarians Muslim “others” to the

Europeans, were now trying to enter the arena of the

civilized nations by inventing their own “barbarians” in the

form of, Ottomans. In this discourse, Islam and Ottomans

became an all-purpose evil entity representing everything

that reform, progress and civilization were not.

Mustafa Kemal discursively adopted the essentialist

typology of the inferior “East” vs. superior “West” and the

7 See Kramer, Heinz. A Changing Turkey: The Challenge to Europe and the United Stated. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000 p. 4

16

Orientalist conceptualization of Islam as backward.

Furthermore, the acceptance of Western intellectual

superiority was the defining feature in the Mustafa Kemal’s

modernization project. On the other hand, within the context

of ambivalent nature of nationalist discourses, Kemalist

nationalist discourse needed to invent a culturally

authentic self and a glorious past within which people of

the nation could identify themselves. In line with the

radical break with Islam and Ottoman past, Mustafa Kemal

imagined a pure pre-Islamic Turkic past which is corrupted

by Islam and Ottomans.

These new perceptions of national identity

simultaneously aspired to a European self and also claimed

authentic Turkic identity which is underlined as pre-Islamic

and thus non-Ottoman. This perception which determined the

dynamics of modernization project also eloquently signaled

through the images of women who became the icons of the new

Republic. Cultural nationalism created a new discursive

space by appropriating women’s emancipation in the name of

pre-Islamic Turkish egalitarianism and condemning certain

17

aspects of Ottoman patriarchy --such as polygyny and the

seclusion of women-- as a corruption of original Turkish

mores. The republic adopted this approach to women’s

emancipation as an item of official state ideology. Within

the context of Europeanization and breaking the ties to

Ottoman past, the women’s dress was considered as the most

outward and evident token of allegiance to the “civilized”

West or “barbaric” Ottomans. Accordingly, the veil become a

critical issue of regulation and control since unveiling

women became a fecund medium for signifying many other

issues at once, such as the construction of modern Turkish

identity as opposed to backward Ottoman identity, the

civilization and modernization of Turkey and the limitation

of Islam to matters of belief and worship.8 Moreover, by

strategically amalgamating the notions of pre-Islamic Turkic

identity and of the unveiling of women as signs of

modernization, Kemalists designed a new narrative that veil

betokens Muslim backwardness and a true Turkish woman had

8 See Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968 p. 125-126.

18

never been covered. 9 Moreover as Sarah Graham-Brown

remarks visual images of women in the 1920s and 1930s

displays them parading in a well-ordered manner and bearing

the flag, in school or military uniform, wearing “ski-pants,

sport shorts and backless bathing-suits”10. She comments on

a picture, named “Turkish Girls under the Republic” which

portrays a group of school girls, wearing uniform sport

shorts and parading in a highly organized way:

“The republican government in Turkey laid stress onorganized physical activity for women and frequentlypublished photographs which extolled this kind of wellordered exercise. This also helped to legitimize a form ofdress which would not otherwise have been sociallyacceptable in public for girls of this age.”11

Nevertheless, it was also stressed that while being

educated, unveiled and “cultivated” by Western cultural

modes, Turkish women should retain the essential “virtues”

of authentic culture. With respect to these “virtues”, women

should continue to be good mothers and wives. Similarly to

the modernist perspectives during Ottoman Empire, women as9 See Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal. Ataturk’un Turk Kadini Hakkindaki Goruslerinden Bir Demet, ed. Turkan Arikan (Ankara, T.B.M.M. Yayinlari, 1984), p.1910 See Graham-Brown, Sarah. Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860-1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p.13211 See Ibid. 131

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mothers and wives were conceived as both icons and also

reproducers of the nation. Mustafa Kemal’s speech sums up

this attitude towards women:

“History shows the great virtues shown by our mothers andgrandmothers. One of these has been to raise sons of whomthe race can be proud. Those whose glory spread across Asiaand as far as the limits of the world have been trained byhighly virtuous mothers who taught them courage andtruthfulness. I will not cease to repeat it, woman’s mostimportant duty, apart from her social responsibilities, isto be a good mother. As one progresses in time, ascivilization advances with giant steps, it is imperativethat mothers be enabled to raise their children according tothe needs of the country.”12

In consequence, the republican government of Kemal

Ataturk and the modernizing campaign that he launched in the

newly founded nation-state of Turkey sustained the

Orientalist legacy of Eurocentric thought. Through

modernization attempts, the superiority of Europe was subtly

verified. On the other hand, he did not neglect to assert an

autonomous identity for the nation. Hence, within the

context of ambivalence of nationalist discourses, Europe is

taken as a model but also as a threat to original native

12 Quoted in Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1986, p.36

20

culture. However, the Ottoman heritage and Islamic tradition

were not only persistently and emphatically renounced as

sources of national identity, but also severely condemned

for corrupting pre-Islamic Turkic culture.

Unattainable Europe, Resurrected Ottoman and Orientalized

“HERself”: ‘Neithers and Nors” of National Identity and the Crisis of

Modernization Project in the 21st century’s Turkey

Kemalist reformers’ efforts of modernization not only

affected the state apparatus as the country changed from a

multiethnic Ottoman empire to a secular republican nation

state. They also attempted to penetrate into the lifestyles,

manners, behavior, and daily customs of people. However,

this “civilization” project which aimed to eradicate the

cultural roots and the legacy of the Islamic-Ottoman Empire

later became a site of contestation rather than conformity.

The revival of the Islamist movements during the 1990s marks

a historical turn and a reconsideration of this extensive

“civilizing” project. Moreover, reactions to the coordinates

of Kemalist national identity intensely shaped the

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emotional, communal and symbolic structure of radical

Islamist and also capitalist Islamist groups.

During 1980’s, Turkey went through significant economic

and cultural changes that resulted from the opening up

economy and the rearrangements in Turkey’s role in the

international arena with the end of the cold war. The rapid

industrialization and the influx of rural populations into

the cities coupled with the denial of membership for the

European Union, created irretrievable formations in the

cultural identities and irresolvable contradictions in the

interpretations of modernization. As Kramer puts it, Turkey

was “still in the transitional stage in that some of the key

structural problems that one tends to associate with semi-

industrial, semiperipheral economies continue to manifest

themselves.”13 Many witnessed the country’s economy becoming

even more bound to Western regulations, and doomed to remain

in the periphery of the “world economy”. The recognition of

unaccomplished westernization in the economic realm and the

13 See Kramer, Heinz. A Changing Turkey: The Challenge to Europe and the United Stated.Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000 p. 13

22

lack of acknowledgement of Turkey as European by Western

countries, revealed a cultural, social and identity crisis

in Turkey. The emotional reaction of subordinated Turks who

imagined themselves perceived, both internally and

externally, as inferior and excluded from the long sought

after identity as European, was manifested through the

Islamic revival of the 1990’s.

During a quest for a remedy for the wounded national

identity, Islamic Refah (Welfare) party gained a wide public

support. Reversing the Orientalist binaries of the East and

West, Islamic party coded the West and its modernity as

corrupted and inferior while constructing the East and Islam

as the ultimate and therefore morally superior opposite of

the West. Therefore, Islamic discourse stresses the

necessity to rejuvenate the Eastern and Islamic values not

only to fight the Western capitalist modernity but also to

defend country’s Ottoman heritage against a superficial

Westernization of Mustafa Kemal. For this discourse, Ottoman

Empire was a lost self and a model for utopian community

whose uniform identity is Islam. This attitude was also

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directly reflected in the image of women. Turkey witnessed

an extensive “veiling” campaign as the ideological sign of

Islamic response to European countries who systematically

coded Turkey as “other” and also of Islamic resistance to

Westernization project launched since the foundation of

Republic.

Nevertheless, Refah party rule, headed by Erbakan soon

lost the support of the Islamic businesses who initially

tried to take advantage of the political affinity to

manipulate the economic decisions for their profit. Erbakan

stick strong to Islamic principles rather than business

principles. On the other hand Islamic businesses in Turkey

did not want to have a different state with Islamic

structures that oppose to Western consumption patterns and

economic alliance with the West. Instead they aimed to

sustain capitalist economic structures, but wanted them “to

be run by different social elite that is more congenial to

their own ideas and economic interest.”14 This linkage

supports the generally moderate attitude of the orders and

14 Ibid. 21

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communities toward the modern Turkish state and its

policies.

The rise of Tayyip Erdogan’s neo-Islamic Justice and

Progress Party15 as the representative of Islamic bourgeois

indicates a climactic turn in the debate over the crafting

of the Turkish national identity. Mediating the Kemalist

affiliation towards the West and radical Islamist return to

Ottoman past, Erdogan’s party crafts a new national

identity. It aspires to Western ideas, as manifested in

party’s extensive attempt to perpetuate the Westernization

project within the political context of negotiation with

European Union. Simultaneously the party aims to restore the

image of “the unwanted Eastern” through re-adoption denied

“Ottoman” identity since Ottomans past is nostalgically

remembered.

Here, it is significant to note that in the assertion

of national identity, neo-Islamic discourse the Orientalist

discursive economy becomes trapped on two levels. On the

first level, in an attempt to further “Europeanize” the

15 In Turkish, it is called “Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi”

25

country, the party implicitly verifies Orientalist

constructions of Western superiority; this is common to all

modernist discourses. On the second level, however, while

rejuvenating Ottoman past as the source of “authentic”

national identity, the party perpetuates the Orientalist

discourse by depicting Ottomans through Orientalist imagery

of “exotic” East. The imagery of the video clip of

Eurovision song that is chosen by the Culture Ministry of

Erdogan’s party perfectly reflects the contradictions of

this new cultural and national identity.

The song musically resonates of Oriental rhythms that

“invite” for belly dance. More significantly, the setting of

its video clip shifts between Ottoman imperial harem and

Turkish bath. The imagery of the clip perpetuates the

Orientalist association of harem as a place of “sexuality”.

Instead of deconstructing the Orientalist misconception of

harem by revealing the political role of harem as an

institution in Ottoman history, the song contributes to the

Orientalist imagery of harem as the signifier of Oriental

debauchery, uncontrolled sexuality and exoticism. Moreover,

26

the depiction of woman in the clip overlaps with the

depiction of Oriental woman in the Orientalist discourse.

The singer Sertab Erener plays a concubine who, no more the

Sultan’s beloved, swears throughout the song that she will

do everything she can to gain the Sultan’s attention back.

This depiction verifies Orientalist imagery of women on

several levels.

Orientalist imagination fantasizes Oriental women as

the embodiment of excessive sexuality and sexual

availability. The writings and paintings convey the idea

that the sexuality prevails on Oriental women’s live as if

their man is “the sole reason for their existence”16, as

their portrayed postures offer a constant readiness for sex.

Besides the portrayal of Ottoman “concubine” as obsessed

with the idea of receiving the sultan’s attention, the

images of other women in the Turkish bath highlights the

sexuality of woman. They are in Turkish bath with signs that

read: preparation for “clean” sex -- and dancing --read:

16 See Graham-Brown, Sarah. “The Seen, the Unseen and the Imagined: Private and Public Lives” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills ed. New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 505

27

lasciviousness and sensuality. Moreover, the depiction of

the “concubine” on the verge of a sexual hysteria confirms

the male imagination that unsatisfied female sexuality is

dangerous.17 It constructs woman as “powerless”, “passive”

and “helpless” objects unless they do not exert their sexual

power and thus, “the only form of power available to them

was the power of sexual attraction.”18 The depiction of

other women in the harem and the hysteria of the unfavored

concubine recode harems as sites of rivalries and jealousies

and reinforces the male-centered assumption that “man” is

the determining force of the dynamics of female

relationships.

In conclusion, through this Eurovision song, Turkey

which is systematically coded as “orient” further

orientalizes “herself”. It not only adopts Orientalist

imagery in representing harem and Turkish woman, but appeals

to the Western gaze by rendering “Orientalized Turkish17 See Mernissi Fatima. “The Meaning of Spatial Boundaries” in in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills ed. New York: Routledge, 2003, p.49618 See Graham-Brown, Sarah. “The Seen, the Unseen and the Imagined: Private and Public Lives” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills ed. New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 505

28

woman” object of Western voyeuristic pleasure. Within the

frame of current cultural politics, the Ottoman past is

emphasized as a source of authentic cultural identity.

However, rather than being authentic, the resurrected

Ottoman self is trapped in the discursive frame of

Orientalism. It should be understood within the context of

the neo-Islamic economic dependency on the Western,

capitalist economy and dependency on the support of “nation”

who is stuck in “n/either European n/or Islamic Ottoman”

nexus. In that sense, the Eurovision song and its video clip

is a new proposal for a new cultural identity. As far as the

relation to West is concerned, new Turkish identity which

still aspires to western ideals, now also openly declares

itself as Oriental “other”. However, the imagery of the song

and the context within which it is represented emphasizes

this difference as a source of cultural richness rather than

an exotic threat. On the other hand, as far as the national

authentic identity is concerned, Ottoman cultural

inheritance is “officially” offered as a source of national

identity in the process of restoring the degraded national

29

“self”. What is new and ironical is that the Ottoman legacy

is now interpreted and conveyed through Western vocabulary

and imagery.

30

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Lila Abu-Lughod ed. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press, 1998

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Graham-Brown, Sarah. Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860-1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988

Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World.London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1986

Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Some Awkard Questions on Women andModernity in Turkey” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity inthe Middle East. Lila Abu-Lughod ed. Princeton, New Jersey.Princeton University Press, 1998

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Mernissi Fatima. “The Meaning of Spatial Boundaries” in in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills ed.New York: Routledge, 2003

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978, p.2

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6842553609067398921&q=sertab+erener http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest

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