Betwixt and between: Turkish print culture and the emergence of a national identity, 1945--1954

In recent decades scholars have debated intensely at which point the Ottoman Empire ended and modern Turkey emerged: is it possible to locate in history a moment when residents of Ottoman Anatolia and Thrace began to think of themselves not as subjects of an expansive, Islamic empire but as citizens of the Turkish nation-state? In an effort to shed new light on the debate, this dissertation assumes a socio-historical perspective: it argues that regardless of conflicting elite conceptions of nation or nationalism that took root in the late nineteenth-century it is only possible to posit the emergence of a national consciousness among Turks—and hence of a Turkish nation—in the decade following World War II. It was at this time that Turkey witnessed both unprecedented social change due to rapid modernization, and the establishment of an increasingly prominent provincial press.; In the Turkish case print functioned neither merely as a means by which the elite might inculcate a national identity within the populace, nor simply as a cultural institution that united a disparate population. Rather, examination of a wide selection of provincial newspapers within the context of national periodicals and printed books from the same period leads to the conclusion that print provided a means by which the Turkish populace themselves actually contributed to the definition of their nation. Following on two decades of authoritarian rule, the rapid growth of the Turkish press after World War II proved an opportunity for Turks to force into the realm of public debate concerns and ideals not necessarily held by the elite.; Initially the dissertation explores the theoretical issues related to print culture and nationalism, and then the growth of the printing industry in Ottoman and Turkish history. It then shifts to an analysis of the content of post-World War II Turkish print culture and explores how periodicals and books represented the Turkish and Ottoman pasts, as well as presented to the public the Soviet communist threat and Turkish participation in the Korean War. My research has revealed that central to Turkish print culture in this period was a rapidly growing religious press, and the dissertation concludes by arguing that contrary to the Kemalist narrative that has dominated Turkish historiography, Turks remained very conscious of their Muslim identity while striving to be both modern and Turkish. To most Turks national identity was by no means neither exclusive nor static: it was, in fact, the product of complex processes, many of which are best viewed from a socio-historical perspective.