Full Description
Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s, an emerging nation state built a particular relationship with the Ottoman past. In its simultaneous disavowal and inheritance of it, this was the new Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923. Nation-states are areas of ideological contestation. However, they are equally visible and tangible. This is thanks to the making of a new world of artefacts in build or print that represent and commemorate them in many, often contradicting ways through design practices. This book offers a thorough account of this new Turkish material world through the trajectories of commemoration; from public monuments, print media, and festive illumination to temporary and permanent architecture from the onset of the 1908 Young Turk revolution to the demise of Turkey's founding single-party regime in the late 1950s. If objects are silent actors of history, their confessions await.
Contents
Introduction
1 Re-imagining the empire in ink and stone
2 Building the nation in bronze: the republican network of monuments
3 Picturing the nation in paint and light
4 Modern by Tradition: monuments in the Inönü era
5 The Republic Looks Back: relics in bone and bronze
Conclusion: a tale of two monuments
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