In 1909, the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati set out to decide âwhether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalized as a white personâ; the New York Times article on the decision, discussing the question of Turksâ whiteness, was cheekily entitled âIs the Turk a White Man?â 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.
Murat Ergin, Ph.D. (2005), University of Minnesota, is Associate Professor of Sociology at Koç University. His research interests include nationalism, race, ethnicity, cultural boundaries, and death.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: WHY THIS BOOK SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN
Race and the Turkish Case
Why Care About the Turkish Case?
The West = Theory; The Rest = âMereâ Case
Cases and National Boundaries
CHAPTER 2: THE REPUBLICAN CONVERSION NARRATIVE
Rewriting History
CHAPTER 3: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE âWESTâ
Becoming White
The Ghosts of the Past: Ottoman Modernization and Encounters with the West
The Ottoman Interest in Race
Ziya Gökalp: The Official Ideologue of the Republic?
The Formation of the âTerrible Turkâ: Western Perceptions
The Problem of Periodization
CHAPTER 4: RACE IN EARLY REPUBLICAN TURKEY
Racial Vocabularies
Mermaids, Fish, Humans: The Taxonomic Discourse
Biometric Mobilization to Protect and Improve the Race
Anthropometric Mobilization to âDiscoverâ the Turkish Race