Aesthetics of Displacement: Turkey and its Minorities on Screen

This is a 95,500 word monograph based on an award-winning PhD research (LSE Turkish Chair, Best Dissertation Award). It explores the relation between cinema and memory, with a focus on Turkey and its minorities, bringing taboo issues concerning the repression of ethnic and religious minorities into visibility.
Treating displacement as the structure of feeling, the study discusses the ways in which changing political and social conditions determine not only the types of stories told but also how they are told. Looking at films that represent the experience of displacement in relation to Turkey's minorities, “Aesthetics of Displacement” argues that there is a particular aesthetic continuity among these otherwise unrelated films, which include “Ararat” (Egoyan, 2002), “Waiting for the Clouds” (Ustaoglu, 2003) and “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” (Ceylan, 2011) among others.

The manuscript identifies five recurring themes and stylistic continuities: politics of language, silence, spatial relations, haunted narratives, and epistolary narratives. Following chapters each focus on significant events concerning ethnic minorities in contemporary Turkey and films that deal with these events: population exchange, Armenian genocide and the ongoing Kurdish resurgence in reaction to Turkish State’s policies of oppression. Each chapter looks at these events separately while establishing recurring themes and issues identified earlier in the book.

With the exception of chapter four, no part of this manuscript has been previously published. Part of chapter four reworks a previously published article (“Past Not-So-Perfect”) but is not a reproduction of it. While the said article focuses on the reception of the film Ararat, the manuscript chapter looks at a number of films in addition to "Ararat" with the aim of arguing for thematic and stylistic continuities in films dealing with displacement, as identified in chapter two of the manuscript.

The manuscript was made open access by "Knowledge Unlatched" in 2020.