Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Rast Müzikoloji Dergisi, cilt.7, sa.2 special issue, ss.2091-2121, 2019 (Scopus)
Edward Said was one of the first writers who drew attention to the power relationships hidden in the Orientalist representations of the East. In his famous book he brilliantly demonstrated in what ways the Orientalist discourse served to justify the unequal relationships between European and non-European people and how it silenced the “Orientals” by paralyzing their ability to represent themselves. However, as some critics rightly noted, “Orient” is not only represented but also speaks for itself. Non¬Western people create their own images of West and East and define their identity by using these mirrors. After all, as Arif Dirlik notes, Orientalism requires the participation and complicity of “Orientals” for its legitimation and hegemony. So it cannot be properly understood unless being analyzed at the same time as a discourse created by non-Western people. For this reason, Orientalism should be seen as the product of the contact zones in which Western and Eastern elite encounters rather than a discourse created solely by the West. These contact zones are the media through which non-Western elites builds their national identity by creating their own images of East and West. This nation-building process may even lead to sharp conflicts with Western imperialism, which turns the entire process to something like Westernization against West. Terms such as Self-Orientalism or Occidentalism have been coined to conceptualize this area of subjectivity in which non-Western elites built their self image with reference to East/West dichotomy. Turkey’s complicated modernization experience gave rise to a mentality that we can best understand in these terms. We can call it Turkish Orientalism. To legitimize their Westernization project, the pioneers of Turkish modernization internalized the Eurocentric conceptualization of the world and embraced the depictions of the “East” as the low-other of the West. However, as ardent nationalists, they also opposed the negative judgments of Western Orientalism about Turks who were seen as an Oriental Other by the West. To reconcile these two attitudes, they created an interior Other into which they would store up all the undesired, “Oriental” elements of Turkishness which were thought to be incompatible with the Western models. Therefore they defined the ideal Turkish identity as something opposed to these “Oriental” elements of Turkishness. This “Oriental” Other was mostly identified with Ottoman past, sometimes with Islam and always with Arabic world. On the other hand, so-called “genuine” Turkishness was redefined as something compatible with West and an antithesis of everything “Oriental” including Arabs. For example Falih Rifki Atay, rightly defined by Nadir Nadi as “the leader writer of the Turkish State”, depicted Westernization as Turkification, more precisely being freed of Arabization. This formula was put into practice in the field of music as well. In early republican period, while Turkish music being redefined in the mirror image of the West-East-Turkishness triangle, the Ottoman musical tradition was dismissed as the Oriental Other. According to official policy, the model was Western music; the enemy was Eastern music which was to a large extent synonymous with the traditional urban music of Turkey, the source of national music was Anatolian folk songs which, unlike Ottoman art music, was considered to be compatible with Western models. And the goal was to create a modern Turkish music which was expected to be both Western and national in character. In other words, pioneers of the music reform divided the musical culture of Turkey into two conflicting part by a self¬Orientalizing strategy, sweeping aside the “Oriental” musical elements inconsistent with the national self-image as foreign intrusions. So Ottoman musical legacy was seen as a non¬Turkish cultural element related to Byzantine and Arabic elements in the past and expelled from national music culture. Labels used to define this music during the alaturka-alafranga debate reflects all the degrading Orientalist clichés such as being irrational, unscientific, drowsy, fatalist, obsolete, submissive to despotism etc. Accordingly, this living urban music tradition was relegated to the past as a fossilized relic while sometimes appeared as an object of admiration for its past civilizational achievements. For this reason Turkish music was frozen down in itsold forms and symbolically put into museum in official institutions. The discourses and labels used to degrade Arabesk music were almost the same as the ones that once used to degrade and dismiss Alaturka or classical Turkish music. But this time intellectual spokesmen of the three officially recognized genres (Turkish art music, Turkish folk music and Western type polyphonic music) united against Arabesk to define it as an antithesis of the ideal Turkish identity. The cultural dichotomies of Turkish orientalism were and are still being reproduced by all parts of the discussion in different ways. Unlike its producers and listeners, intellectual commentators identified Arabesk with its so- called Arabic/Oriental elements, reducing the emotions invoked by this music to an unhealthy melancholy and its message to fatalism. Arabesk artists were also condemned to spoil Turkish music by distorting its traditional forms and patterns. In this article, it is argued that this reductionist and homogenizing approach has its source in Turkish orientalism which substitutes cultural essences for culture as lived experience, therefore freezing the ideal culture in the past or addressing itto a utopian future. This mentality has restrained us to see Arabesk music as a lived cultural experience having arisen from the complex historical relationships between Turkish (art and folk), Arabic, Western and other musical elements rather than a degeneration of the genuine Turkish culture. In this respect, this article traces the impact of self-Orientalism and Occidentalism in Arabesk debates from past to present in a historical perspective.