Social Trauma and Telecinematic Memory

Beschreibung

This book explores responses to authoritarianism in Turkish society through popular culture by examining feature films and television serials produced between 1980 and 2010 about the 1980 coup. Envisioned as an interdisciplinary study in cultural studies rather than a disciplinary work on cinema, the book advocates for an understanding of popular culture in discerning emerging narratives of nationhood. Through feature films and television serials directly dealing with the coup of 1980, the book exposes tropes and discursive continuities such as “childhood” and “the child”. It argues that these conventional tropes enable popular debates on the modern nation’s history and its myths of identity. 

This book explores responses to authoritarianism in Turkish society through popular culture by examining feature films and television serials produced between 1980 and 2010 about the 1980 coup. Envisioned as an interdisciplinary study in cultural studies rather than a disciplinary work on cinema, the book advocates for an understanding of popular culture in discerning emerging narratives of nationhood. Through feature films and television serials directly dealing with the coup of 1980, the book exposes tropes and discursive continuities such as “childhood” and “the child”. It argues that these conventional tropes enable popular debates on the modern nation’s history and its myths of identity. 

Autor*in

Pelin Başcı

Themen in »Social Trauma and Telecinematic Memory«

Turkish culture Turkey coup film nationhood Balkans Caucuses television serial military takeover traumatic memory political cinema

Stimmen zu »Social Trauma and Telecinematic Memory«

“The book tries to establish how telecinematic remembrance is culturally significant as a public performance of memory. That is why it identifies not as a work on cinema, but as a project that finds its roots in cultural studies. … Acknowledging that the whole country is going through another wave of authoritarianism, Başcı ends on an explicitly hopeful note, stating that coups films also have a way of showing how top-down policies are doomed to fail.” (Can Koçak, Studies in European Cinema, May 19, 2022)
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“Başcı offers masterful, multi-layered, and complex analyses of an interesting selection of films on a traumatic event that continues to haunt people of Turkey, individually and collectively. She not only addresses the workings of nation-building, militarism, patriarchy and authoritarian politics but also delves into the conceptualization of childhood, family, and gender both at the time of the coup and historically. Examining the recent Turkish cinema as a site of national identity construction and a recording of memory that challenges and deconstructs the ‘official’ account, the book is grounded in theories of Cultural Studies but speaks to the concerns of a number of fields, disciplinary or interdisciplinary.” (Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, Professor of Political Science, University of Connecticut, USA)

“In Turkey, coups play a pivotal role in a power struggle for the nation's soul. In this sophisticated, articulate and thought-provoking book, Başcı analyzes how Turkish films about the 1980 coup have reimagined national history and identity, healing the repressed trauma of the coup period, while linking it to the dark side of Turkey's post-coup transformation into a ‘new’ society.” (Jenny White, Professor, Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies, Sweden)

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