Two Tales of a Nation: Ulus as a Site of Competing Historical Narratives

This paper looks at two competing historical narratives in Turkey in their struggles over collective memory for the production and contestation of communal identities. As Art (2006, p.18) notes, “although many political scientists would agree that ‘memory matters,’ there have been few studies that trace the nexus between ideas about the past and political power.” In parallel, Kansteiner (2002, p.184) similarly points out that “despite this relatively obvious link, the connection between memory and identity has as yet been rarely discussed in memory studies.” As this paper will illustrate, historical narratives open a fruitful strand of research into the study of society and politics that has so far left relatively unexplored. In order to delve deeply into historical narratives at work in the Turkish case, this paper focuses on struggles over (re)defining a nation through historical narratives by specifically focusing on the case of Ulus, Ankara. Ulus, which literally means “the nation” in contemporary Turkish, became central first to the Kemalist modernization efforts and later to the political Islamist goals of reshaping the nation once the political Islamists captured first municipal and then state level rule. The paper compares how the secularist and Islamist versions of Turkish nationalism turned Ulus into an epicenter of hegemonic struggle by writing different historical narratives through different museums, “pilgrimage” sites and monuments. The stories woven around the past have important implications in terms of gender, national identity, and political community as this study aims to reveal.