Suchergebnisse

By way of an introduction : the entangled legacies of a population exchange -- part I. Humanism and its discontents : biopolitics, politics of expertise, and the human family. Segregative biopolitics and the production of knowledge -- Liberal humanism, race, and the family of mankind -- part II. Of origins and "men" : family history, genealogy, and historicist humanism revisited. Heritage and family history -- Origins, biopolitics, and historicist humanism -- part III. Unity in diversity : culture, social cohesion, and liberal multiculturalism. Museumization of culture and alterity recognition -- Turkish-Islamic synthesis and coexistence after the 1980 military coup -- In lieu of a conclusion : cultural analysis in an age of securitarianism

Abstract
How do we connect the past with the present to address structural problems? While the pursuit of a cause-and-effect past flowing into the present contributes to the understanding of an event or object, how that past is recalled, represented, related, disconnected, suppressed, and/or obfuscated in any given present matters. This article proposes palimpsests as a critical tool for analyzing the many histories of the present. To illustrate this theoretical practice, the article offers a palimpsestic reading of a museumized object, the Nubian Temple of Dendur, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The structural nature of a history of the present comes into view only when one is able to discern multiple histories, presents, categories, and objects layered together within the palimpsest of history.

In 2010, the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange Museum opened its doors as part of the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture (ECoC) project. Presented as the first migration-themed museum of Turkey, it is a site of cultural recollection focused on family histories. Yet the museum, Iğsız argues, beyond being a site of memory, also crystallizes larger dynamics of cultural policy and recognition of alterity. Concentrating on the European Union Cultural Policy and the Istanbul 2010 ECoC, two official institutions that fund the museum, Iğsız analyzes the transnational dynamics of institutional and official endorsements of diversity and how such endorsements "museumize" culture for display. The article examines the limits of liberal multiculturalism as promoted in the EU cultural policy, revealing how Turkish officials have "discovered" liberal multiculturalism in the Ottoman past as a history of tolerance, which is manifested as a mode of neo-Ottomanism.