|
View the H-Levant Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Levant's January 2013 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Levant's January 2013 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Levant home page.
Hi Dear Colleagues, I am looking to put together a panel for the 2013 annual meeting of Middle East Studies Association (MESA). The tentative title of the panel is “Responses to Kemalism in the Middle East from 1920s through 1940s.” After the First World War, Turkish, Arab, and Kurdish nationalists were dedicated to creating a separate ethnic identity free from the Ottoman and in some cases from the Islamic past. This panel will attempt to use “responses to Kemalism” as a theme to shed further light into the identity debates in the former Ottoman Middle Eastern territories. My own paper will deal with the Kurdish nationalists’ analysis and criticism of Kemalism during the late 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. I will try to explain how the former Ottoman Kurdish nationalist elites exiled in Syria and Lebanon under the French mandate viewed Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) and, his nationalist and secular reforms in Turkey including Kurdish territories. Here are some of the questions we can try to answer: 1) How were Mustafa Kemal and his reforms perceived in a negative or positive light in each case? 2) Was Kemalism condemned and imitated at the same time? 3) How did the responses to Kemalism shape the evolving national (Arab, Kurdish, Persian, and Kurdish) identities? 4) How did Kemalism influence the ideas of religious groups or movements (Muslim, Christian, Jewish)? 5) How did non-Turkish secular intellectuals or groups, who were critical of Kemalist ethnic Turkish nationalism, view secular reforms by Mustafa Kemal? 6) How were Kemalist Turkish linguistic, historical and spatial theories perceived by the rival nationalist movements? The papers in this panel are expected to be based on original research making use of archival documents, memoirs, periodicals or other primary documents. If you would like to contribute to this panel with an analysis of negative or/and positive responses to Kemalism by the former Ottoman Arabs and Turks, or Iranians in the 1930s and 1940s, please feel free to contact me as soon as possible at aakturk@uark.edu Ahmet S. Akturk PhD Candidate in History University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|