Social Trauma and Telecinematic Memory: Imagining the Turkish Nation Since the 1980 Coup

2017 | History & Politics

This book explores responses to authoritarianism in Turkish society through popular culture by examining feature films and television serials produced between 1980 and 2010 about the 1980 coup. Envisioned as an interdisciplinary study in cultural studies rather than a disciplinary work on cinema, the book advocates for an understanding of popular culture in discerning emerging narratives of nationhood. Through twenty-eight feature (art-house and mainstream) films and three controversial television serials with political content which directly deal with the coup of 1980, the book exposes tropes and discursive continuities such as "childhood" and "the child". It argues that these conventional tropes enable popular debates on the modern nation's history and its myths of identity. Coup films construct the nation's past though the metaphor of childhood, and its future-utopian possibilities-through the figure of the child, suggesting both the nation's past traumas and its future possibilities as a way of expanding popular discourses on history and identity.

Pelin Basci (Author)