“Communicating America,” Validating Turkey

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 10 (1999) : 81-89. “Communicating America,” Validating Turkey Laurence Raw The topic of this year’s seminar—“Communicating America: Media, Culture and Nation in the Age of Information” (Cappadocia, October 1999)—aimed to focus on Americanization, its relationship to globalization, and what the implications of this might be for the future of American Studies in Turkey. The plenary speaker, Richard J. Pells (University of Texas at Austin), had already published widely on the subject; in a 1993 article, he contended that “nationalism has continued to flourish in Europe, in spite of the American intrusion, and cultural idiosyncrasies remain indigenous to each country regardless of transmissions from abroad” (“American Culture Abroad: The European Experience since 1945” 82). In another article published four years later, he suggested that “Europeans have adapted American popular culture to their own needs, tastes and traditions” (“The Local and Global Loyalties of Europeans and Americans” B5). What was evident from many papers presented at the seminar was that such statements assume both positive and negative connotations in the Turkish context. On the one hand, the introduction of American culture has been accommodated into the Turkish project of modernity, which has attempted to forge a modern nationstate along western lines. On the other hand, the recent fragmentation of cultural identity has prompted people to question the ethics of the nation-state itself. There has been considerable debate on the future of Turkish cultures—especially the national culture—in an increasingly globalized and/or Americanized world (the terms were often used interchangeably in the seminar). At first, however, it seemed as if this seminar would follow a pattern similar to that of many previous seminars, with both Turkish and non-Turkish speakers offering accounts of the emergence of numerous forms of cultural expression in the public sphere. Many of these originated in America, and subsequently spread worldwide, creating almost limitless possibilities for the re-negotiation of identity, whether at the personal or national levels. This apparently vindicates Pells’s observation that most Europeans (including, in this case, the majority of the seminar participants) had successfully adapted elements of American culture to their own needs, tastes and traditions. In her paper “Mediated Voices: From Private Experience to Social Policy,” Donna Wyckoff (Başkent University) used individual case-histories (or herstories) to demonstrate how new collective identities could be forged, particularly if individuals were prepared to become “claim-makers” or “consciousness-rousers” by appearing on television, writing for the newspapers, or establishing pressuregroups. This could provide a variety of opportunities for resistance. Wyckoff drew attention to the way in which American culture can serve as a proving ground for democracy by offering new conceptions of identity; in other words, that practices of choice and personal autonomy are permitted, enabling individuals to work towards new freedoms at both the social and political levels. Victoria Amador (Hacettepe University) made similar claims in her analysis of “Positive Gay/Lesbian Images in the 1990s American Cinema.” She began by focusing on how gay and lesbian identities had been represented both in mainstream Hollywood movies and in independent productions since the beginning of the twentieth century. By tradition, Hollywood had been rather wary of such material: one only has to recall how the part of Stanley Kowalski had to be rewritten for the film version of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Even today, most major Hollywood studios tend to treat gay and lesbian issues in a superficial manner—for example, by including a celibate gay man (played by Rupert Everett) as Julia Roberts’s confidante in the heterosexual romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997). Amador subsequently looked at recent independent productions—both American and non-American—which attempted to deconstruct stereotypical images of gay and lesbian identity. The fact that some of these films—e.g. Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)— proved successful at the American box-office demonstrated that resistance to the Hollywood hegemony is not only possible but inevitable. Aslıhan Tokgöz (Doğuş University) presented a clumsily titled paper, “Robert Coover’s Employment of Filmic Devices as a ‘Projection’ of the Contemporary American Situation,” which attempted to demonstrate how resistance was central to the notion of “postmodern” America, in which old ways of life had been dissolved and new ones set in place. This was especially apparent in the novelist Robert Coover’s use of cinematic techniques—frequent shifts between past and present, abrupt changes of scene. Tokgöz further suggested that this was something to be celebrated, not mourned: by ignoring conventions such as the linear narrative, or the omniscient narrator (which were characteristic of “mainstream” American novels), Coover had enabled individual readers to draw their own conclusions as to what exactly was meant by “the contemporary American situation.” Other papers sought to determine the extent to which this spirit of resistance had penetrated the lives of young people in Turkey. Using responses to a questionnaire as a basis for research, Jeffrey Howlett’s analysis of “Peep Show TV: America, Voyeurism and Consumerism on the Turkish Airwaves” revealed that the majority of his first-year students in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Başkent University wore Levis or Lee Cooper jeans, watched American films, and listened to American music. But they did not consider themselves Americanized; on the contrary, they viewed such products as a way of asserting their independence from restrictive local traditions and practices. This also provided them with a reason for wanting to study American culture at university. Gönül Pultar has expressed this view succinctly in a recent article: American studies signifies for me the possibility of “doing new things” in a manner that is not possible in other disciplines. American studies is an area in which new things are happening, generating new methodologies that eventually find their way into other disciplines. This freedom is the main characteristic and attraction of American studies for me, besides its capacity of imparting a sense of freedom and democracy through the study of American institutions. (11) This notion of resistance (which is similar to that expressed by Wyckoff in the American context) derives from the belief that the experience of American mass culture in Turkey can offer new opportunities for freedom of expression to otherwise marginalized individuals. Other speakers’ views of resistance appeared to be inspired by more traditional conceptions of modernity. In her survey of (...truncated)