Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda ulusal kimliklerin oluşumu: Arnavut örneği 1878-1912

Modern theorists and scholars of nationalism, like Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Anthony D. Smith, and Eric Hobsbawm, have concluded how the nation-building process happens. These theories go beyond the narrative of what happened, as to say the events, battles, or political movements; they go further and analyze more detailed facts about the process of nation-building, which here, we call as 'Trajectory of National Identity Building.' It appears that before nationalism becomes Nationalism, as is to say before a nation becomes an 'ism' or an ideology, it goes through a specific process, which mainly includes writings and intellectual efforts from that particular nation's intelligentsia. These writings mostly try to give answers to the questions of 'Who are we?' or 'Who am I?', 'Where do I/We come from?', 'What makes us different from others?', and other questions like that try to give their nation a kind of uniqueness. Part of this trajectory is what I call in this thesis 'The Archaeology of the Past', which is the efforts of searching history for an ideological 'Golden Age'. During this period, that particular nation or people had better well-being, which should contain heroes and foes, such as friends and enemies. What is apparent in these intellectual movements is their efforts to present a political platform for the future, as was the Megali Idea for Greek nationalism or as it was Nacertanija for Serbian nationalism. In this thesis, we will be addressing the question: Can we analyze the trajectory of nation-building processes in the Ottoman Empire within the context of these modern theories? Yes, there are many writings about nationalism in the Ottoman Empire. Still, they are mainly for 'Nationalism' as we said in the beginning, not about the 'National Identity formation process', a distinction I write about. To answer this question, we have chosen to analyze a specific case in the Ottoman Empire: and that is the Albanian case. We have chosen different first sources of writings from the Albanian intelligentsia, such as Semseddin Sami Frashëri, Pashko Vasa, and Naim Frashëri. We will analyze them from the context of theories written by Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Anthony D. Smith, and Eric Hobsbawm.