Browsing by Author "Mccallum, Ebru"

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An Analysis of Birds Without Wings in Terms of Turkish Nation-State Building Process
(2024) Mccallum, Ebru; Kara, Esen
The rise of nationalism in Europe in the late 19th century led to the collapse of big empires and establishment of smaller nation states. The Ottoman Empire was one of these great empires and it was replaced by Turkish nation-state in its remaining territory: Anatolia. The transition from a multi-ethnic and multi-faith social structure to one that aimed to create a uniformly Turkish and Muslim society necessitated some social engineering which relied heavily on the ideals of Westernization and a rejection of the Ottoman cultural heritage. This meant imagining the many aspects of the community of the new Turkish nation-state including the national identity, which aimed for homogenization. The Turkish nation was imagined to be Turkish speaking Muslim citizens of predominantly Turkish descent. Such an imagination meant excluding the elements of the society that did not fit. In his Birds without Wings, Louis de Bernieres takes his reader to an imaginary heavenly town on the Mediterranean coast of Anatolia with a diverse and harmonious population and shows how it experiences the era from World War 1 through the establishment of the Turkish nation state. The inhabitants of the town all experience the pain and suffering caused by the war in their own ways and the negative impacts of the greater world with its imperial wars and of Mustafa Kemal with his genius as a soldier and social engineer. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the insights Louis de Bernieres' Birds without Wings offers about the formation of the Turkish nation-state and the methods used to communicate these insights. Keywords: Nation-state formation, Turkish modernization, the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, homogenization, intercultural dialogue, multiculturalism