Türkiye'de 1968 Dönemi sosyal hareketlerini hatırlamak

This thesis analyzes the discursive transformations that have occurred in remembrance of the social movements of the 1968 era in Turkey by focusing on the selected works produced respectively in 1978, 1988, 1998 and 2008. I argue that in each epoch we see the emergence of a new discourse to represent the 1968 era which is both shaped by and speaks to its political milieu. In 1978, the struggle was presented to be between self-sacrificial honorable and the dishonorable people, reflecting the atmosphere of intensifying inter-communal conflicts of the late 1970?s. In 1988, a new discourse emerged which represented the 1968 era as the struggle of idealists who were likened to new entrepreneurs of the neo-liberal age with their common thrust for novelty and change. In 1998, the dominant discourse presented the social movements as the struggle of Kemalist youth against those who opposed the Kemalist modernization project, mainly the Islamist social movements, thus revealing the contours of political conflicts of the 1990?s in Turkey. For 2008, I analyze the TV series Hatırla Sevgili which represented the conflicts of the last decades in general and the conflicts of the 1968 era in particular as primarily resulting from the machinations of deep state. I argue that this discourse on deep state makes possible to imagine a pre-violence community of cohesion where people from different religious, ethnic, status groups and classes can harmoniously live together. I argue that this naturalized unity is an ideological fantasy disguising the reality that the national space is dominated by inequalities and injustices resulting from imbalances of power. Hence, via the analysis of each work I aim to demonstrate that new dominant discourses on the national polity have developed in specific historical contexts.Keywords: Discourse analysis, social movements, Turkey, national polity, neo-liberalism, Kemalism, Multiculturalism, ideological fantasy, class, deep state, conflict.