SEMINAR: Bringing Turkey (Back) into Asia

Contemporary views of Turkey tend to focus on the country’s links and connections with the Middle East and/or Europe. However, the country’s considerable contacts with Asia, both historically and in the present, have remained largely obscured. Japan, in particular played an important role for Turkey, both in terms of narratives of “Asia” (and Turkey’s relationship to Asia), as well as with reference to notions of modernity. On the surface, the juxtaposing of Turkey and Japan may seem like an odd choice of topic. However, there are in fact areas of historical and socio-economic intersection and commonality between the two, including the ways in which the project of modernity unfolded in both countries, and how both have defined their modern national identities in relation to the “West” and the “non-West” (specifically, “Asia”), both physically and ideologically. This paper traces the intertwinings between the two countries from when both embarked on their respective projects of modernity in the second half of the nineteenth-century through the pre- and post-World War Two decades in the twentieth-century, through to the post-Cold War era. The paper draws attention to the ways in which the two countries have imagined and referenced one another, especially with reference to notions of “Asia” and the “West” as conceptual and ideological “spaces”.



BIO: Romit Dasgupta teaches in the Discipline of Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Re-reading the Salaryman in Japan: Crafting Masculinities (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of Configurations of Family in Contemporary Japan (Routledge, 2014). Over the past two years, has also been connected to the Graduate School of Social Sciences at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey working on his current research project on Turkey-Japan interactions.