Exilic Sites of Interimperial Memory: On Polish Legacies in Istanbul

 The seminar will take place online, 16 December at 9:30am CET.
 Please register in order to participate:
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../regi.../ZSaIi_b6SIq_Kqnj7eo6uw

In Istanbul today, postimperial nostalgia is not difficult to encounter—Neo-Ottomanism has reshaped and accentuated the cityscape in both overt and subtle ways. Beyond the hegemony of Neo-Ottoman nostalgia, however, other imperial legacies also persevere in the city. This presentation considers the multiple sites of Polish identification and memory in Istanbul in order to trace their interimperial, postimperial logics and textures. After summarizing a comprehensive, general approach to postimperial collective memories and legacies, we introduce the two key sites of Polish memory in Istanbul: the Adam Mickiewicz Museum in Tarlabaşı/Beyoğlu and Polonezköy/Adampol, a village on the outskirts of Asian Istanbul that was originally founded as a refuge for Polish émigrés in the mid-19th Century. In particular, we focus on mortuary articulations of memory in each location: the former temporary grave of Mickiewicz in the basement of his eponymous museum and the Polonezköy cemetery, which contains far more Polish residents than currently reside in the village. Following this, we offer an ethnographic portrait of the political dilemmas that challenge Polonezköy today as a result of the steady decline of Polish-speaking residents and the influx of migrants from central and eastern Turkey, which has led to substantial shifts in the local configuration of political power. Ultimately, efforts to cultivate “Polish” memory in Polonezköy/Adampol confront the stark reality of the demographic wane and consequent political diminishment of the villages’ Polish speakers.

Jeremy F. Walton is a cultural anthropologist whose research resides at the intersection of memory studies, urban studies, the comparative study of empires and imperialism, and critical perspectives on materiality. He leads the research group “REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation” at the University of Rijeka, Croatia, with support from a European Research Council consolidator grant (#10100290). Prior to this, he led the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Walton’s first book, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), is an ethnography of Muslim NGOs, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey. His writing has appeared in a plethora of scholarly and popular journals, including American Ethnologist, Sociology of Islam, Die Welt Des Islams, History and Anthropology, The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Jadaliyya, and Sidecar (The New Left Review). REVENANT, which Dr. Walton designed, is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on postimperial memories and legacies in post-Habsburg, post-Ottoman realms, and post-Romanov realms.

Dr. Arzu Ünal is an anthropologist specializing in the intersections of gender, migration, nationalism, secularism, and Muslim material cultures. She is currently a faculty member in the Sociology Department at Ibn Haldun University, where she also serves as the Vice-Director of the School of Graduate Studies. Dr. Ünal’s post-doctoral research includes a project at Amsterdam University, where she explored single mothers and new maternal families in Turkey as part of the ERC-funded initiative Problematizing 'Muslim Marriages'. She also contributed to the ERC-funded Staging Abjection project, an ethnographic study on Turkish state opera and the cultural politics of Islam. Her publications include articles in journals such as Material Religion and Hawwa, as well as chapters in edited volumes like Beauty and the Norm and Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion.