Türkiye'de çokkültürcülük: Kültürel çeşitlilik tahayyülleri ve bir açmaz olarak tanıma

This thesis examines how ordinary Turkish citizens perceive and respond to changes throughout the last decade in the cultural politics of the Turkish state regarding the Kurdish question. Based on in-depth interviews with fourteen Turkish Sunni-Muslim individuals, I aim to understand how collective belonging and otherness is imagined by subjects of the dominant identity and what do these narratives tell about identity-based structural inequalities in Turkey. Setting neoliberal multiculturalism as the analytical framework of the study, I take recognition to be a governmental project to reconstruct the political community within the rhetoric of unity-in-diversity. Three pivotal mechanisms of government are discerned to be in operation: Culturalization of politics; demarcation of the public and private spheres as respectively realms of universality and particularity; and differentiation between desirable and undesirable subjectivities via the neoliberal trope of responsible-moral citizen. The resulting explanatory scheme is the conundrum of recognition, intended to delineate that recognition of the Kurdish identity goes hand in hand with its denial according to the extent to which difference is politicized by the Other. Second, this conundrum is daily experienced by Turkish subjects in such ways that Turkishness is affectively reproduced in everyday encounters with the manifestations of Kurdishness, whereby the latter is fantasized as disrupting the otherwise possible wholeness of the nation. It is the main argument of the study that within the institutional, discursive and affective ground at hand, nationalism is functioning in more effective ways to undermine the right-claims of Kurds when coevally reproducing the normativity of Turkishness in the face of politicized group difference.