This article analyzes the discursive strategies of the Turkish Jewish community of Çanakkale to make sense of their troubled memories resulting in a mass emigration. Considering the emphasis on silence in the present literature on the memory practices of the Jewish community, I argue that they do not simply avoid facing the past but rather refer to nostalgia as a complementary, proactive strategy. My analysis is based on the memoirs and impressions of the individual members who took part in the annual visit to Çanakkale to highlight the role of nostalgia between silence and speaking out. The critical discourse analysis of the narratives published in the newsweekly Şalom reveals that nostalgia emerges as a silence-breaker. In addition to the constructive strategy of presenting the discourses of coexistence and good-neighborhood embodied in a distinctive local identity, they propose a strategy of dismantling the figures that challenge the former by de-ethnicizing them.
Migration has significantly shaped the changing demographics of Turkey and the interplay between the self-image of the state and its citizens as elements of nation-building policies, dating back to the late Ottoman period. Although the effects of migration and its representations have been the subject of scholarly studies about collective memory, textbooks have largely been omitted from studies about migration. This article analyzes the topics and discursive strategies used to construct narratives of migration and migrants in secondary-level history textbooks by considering ways in which textbooks construct and transmit collective self-images. Adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, the author demonstrates how topoi are used to present a favorable or problematic image of migration.
This article presents how emotions contribute to the construction of self-images by shaping perceptions of particular problems that arise during cultural encounters, as described in Turkish instruction textbooks in Germany. I argue that textbooks serve as key information and emotion entrepreneurs, generating emotional resources to shape particular understandings of problems while constructing self-image(s) in transgenerational and transcultural contexts during these encounters between heritage- and mainstream-cultures. A critical discourse analysis of narratives depicting how they were considered as a challenge to the socio-cultural belonging of the actors of heritage culture would highlight textbooks’ representative role as agents of social change through the adoption of specific discursive components and strategies. In addition to research on emotions and textbooks, the analysis would contribute to the study of religion by demonstrating how debates referring to religious reasoning can be approached as social issues perceived and conceptualized through an emotional framework attached to socio-cultural belonging.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.