Of Dark Pasts and Pipe Dreams: The Turkish University

Abstract

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of History we offer a course called “MIT and Slavery.” It is taught by Professor Craig S. Wilder who wrote a book about the intertwined history of the American universities and slavery. How this course came to be illuminates important changes in American academia in the last decade or so. It is also extremely inspiring. As an Armenian from Turkey who works on the history of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, I have observed this wave of awareness and action with admiration. Even though this American awakening is long overdue, and the current level of action is not enough, the process opened my eyes to the possibility of doing otherwise. “Doing otherwise” not only in terms of institutions but also in terms of questioning the historical conditions that enabled certain types of knowledge(s) to be produced while inhibiting others.

Keywords

• MECLIS
• Universities
• American
• Turkish
• Academia

References

1. 1 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
2. 2 For a summary of the birth of this movement, see the information provided on the website of the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) Consortium created and led by the University of Virginia, “Universities Studying Slavery (USS): the Birth of a Movement,” 2013, maintained by the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library,
3. 3 Slavery and Justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice (2006), accessed November 2, 2021, https://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/documents/SlaveryAndJustice.pdf.
4. 4 In early 2007, the Brown Corporation endorsed a set of initiatives in response to the committee’s report and many of its recommendations have since been implemented.
5. 5 Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014).
6. 6 Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles, “Trayvon Martin and the Hashtag Campaign that Set the Stage for Black Lives Matter,” accessed November 2, 2021, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/trayvon-martinhashtag-black-lives-matter-movement/.
7. 7 Of the many trailblazing works, native historian, Standing Rock member Vine Deloria Jr’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: MacMillan, 1969) is worthy of special mention as a classic. The book criticizes how the story of the coming of the US has been told without much regard to the erasure of native people and how anthropologists produced knowledge about the Native Americans in an exploitative manner that did more harm than good.
8. 8 Jomaira Salas Pujols, “Epilogue: Scarlet in Black—On the Uses of History,” Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, edited by Marisa J. Fuentes and Deborah Gray White (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 160–164, esp. 160.

9. 9 Richard L. Edwards, “Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History,” November 10, 2015, accessed October 24, 2021, https://newbrunswick.rutgers.edu/pastchancellors/committee-enslaveddisenfranchised-populations-rutgers-history. It is worth noting that many events in US universities now start with notes of “acknowledgment” of whose land the university is located. Many email signatures of professors carry statements to that effect, recognizing that their university is on the native land of X tribe/nation.
10. 10 See MIT President L.Rafael Reif’s letter at the university paper on August 24, 2021 about this recently revealed fact: L.Rafael Reif, “Facing a difficult history,” MIT Technology Review, August 24, 2021, accessed October 24, 2021, https:// www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/24/1030530/facing-a-difficult history/.
11. 11 I participated in one of the community conversations about the topic: “The Task of History-MIT and the Legacy of Slavery Dialogue Series,” MIT SHASS, May 3, 2018, accessed October 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sM_rEPbFstE.
12. 12 Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Seyhan Bayraktar, Politik und Erinnerung: Der Diskurs über den Armeniermord in der Türkei zwischen Nationalismus und Europäisierung (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2010).
13. 13 I am aware of the dangers of anti-black/anti-immigrant rhetoric of Donald Trump and the white supremacist policies of his administration. A recent book by a known anthropologist doing “perpetrator research” (a subfield of Genocide studies) finely addresses these alarming signs: Alexander Laban Hinton, It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US (New York: New York University Press, 2021).
14. 14 For more on this topic, see the website of the newly formed organization of US professors called Academic Freedom Alliance. “Solidarity in Pursuit of Truth” Academic Freedom Alliance, accessed October 24, 2021, https://academicfreedom.org/.
15. 15 This petition titled “We will not be party to this crime” states that “as academics and researchers working on and/or in Turkey, [we] declare that we will not be a party to this massacre by remaining silent and demand an immediate end to the violence perpetrated by the state.” For more see “Barış İçin Akademisyenler,” Academics for Peace, accessed October 24, 2021, https://barisicinakademisyenler.net/.
16. 16 Melissa Bilal theorizes the topic via her ethnographic research in her “Lullabies and the Memory of Pain: Armenian Women’s Remembrance of the Past in Turkey,” Dialectical Anthropology 43 (2019): 185–206. For a discussion of Kurdish people’s memory transmission of the genocide in Diyarbakır, see: Adnan Çelik and Namık Kemal Dinç, Yüz Yıllık Ah! Toplumsal Hafızanın İzinde: 1915 Diyarbekir (Istanbul: İsmail Beşikçi Vakfı, 2015).
17. 17 Jennifer M. Dixon, Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2018).
18. 18 Imge Oranlı, “Epistemic Injustice from Afar: Rethinking the Denial of Armenian Genocide,” Social Epistemology 35, no. 2 (2021): 120–132, esp. 126.
19. 19 Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Anahid Astoyan, Bursayi Nahanki Hayutyan Dndesagan Vijageyv Niutagan Gorusdnere Hayots Tseghasbanutyan Darinerun (Yerevan: H.H. Kaa Kidutyun Hradaragchutyun, 2017); Ümit Kurt, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).
20. 20 For the “denialist habitus” see Talin Suciyan, Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016); for “secular dhimmitude” see Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016), esp. chapter 4.
21. 21 I made this point in: Lerna Ekmekcioglu, “A Climate for Abduction, A Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 3 (2013): 522–553, esp. 551, n. 109.
22. 22 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
23. 23 Nora Tataryan picked up this question in: Nora Tataryan Aslan, “Facing the Past: Aesthetic Possibility and the Image of ‘Super-Survivor,’ ” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 17, no. 3 (2021): 348–365.
24. 24 I take guidance here from the most recent book of Donald Bloxham, History and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
25. 25 Barış Ünlü, Türklük Sözleşmesi: Oluşumu, İşleyişi ve Krizi (Ankara: Dipnot Yayınları, 2018).
26. 26 Arsen Arşık, “İlk Doktoralı Osmanlı Gökbilimcisinin Acı Sonu,” Cumhuriyet, April 24, 2015.
27. 27 Melissa Bilal, “Türkiyeli Ermenileri Hatırlamak,” in Bir Zamanlar Ermeniler Vardı (Istanbul: Birikim Yayınları, 2005): 237–246; Bilal, “The Lost Lullaby and Other Stories about Being an Armenian in Turkey,” New Perspectives on Turkey 34 (2006): 67–92.
28. 28 For a rare critical revaluation of one’s own previous scholarship as well as family history in the context of Turkish academia’s “past century of silence, complicity, and denial,” see Ayşe Gül Altınay “Undoing Academic Cultures of Militarism: Turkey and Beyond,” Current Anthropology 60, supplement 19 (February 2019): S15–S25.
29. 29 I am inspired by Simona Sharoni’s critique of women’s peacebuilding and conflict transformation initiatives in Israel and Palestine: Simona Sharoni, “Gender and conflict transformation in Israel/Palestine,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13, no. 4 (2012): 113–128.
30. 30 Taner Akçam, “Bizim Martin Luther King’imiz,” Taraf, September 16, 2013. He repeats this theme in many other opinion pieces.
31. 31 Boris Adjemian and Vazken Khatchig Davidian, “Scholarship and Introspection in the Time of War,” Études arméniennes contemporaines 13 (2021): 255–257, https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.2743.
32. 32 For an informative discussion and critical assessment of the Turkish intellectuals’ 2008 Apology Campaign see Ayda Erbal, “Mea culpas, Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the ‘Apology’ of Turkish Intellectuals,” in Reconciliation, Civil society, and the Politics of Memory, edited by Birgit Schwelling (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2013), 51–94.