1261 | 475 | everyday politics of nostalgia against the enclosure of public spaces in turkey

This paper seeks to explore everyday political implications of nostalgia through a discussion on politics of public space in Turkey. Taking a cue from research on public space cultures under neoliberal urbanism, it analyses, from a sociological perspective, how nostalgia, as a collective affect, challenges market-oriented authoritarian urban imaginaries. _x000D_
Typically, nostalgia is seen as antagonistic with emancipatory politics, since nationalist or fundamentalist political currents do stimulate nostalgia for a majestic and glorious past. Notwithstanding such implications, I suggest that nostalgia also consists of completely opposite logics that might serve to overcome the shattering effects of neoliberal enclosures. Drawing from Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective modalities of nostalgia, I argue that place-based, everyday political subjectivities, which mobilize a reflective nostalgia for the unrealised dreams of the past, bring up the possibilities that have proved closed due to neoliberal urbanism. For, the very act of remembering and longing provide a common ground for city dwellers of varying background to navigate the tension between anonymity and familiarity. As they familiarise the public space in reference to their vulnerabilities instead of real or imagined superiorities, the acts of reclaiming public space open up a space for encounters between them. As such, reflective nostalgia subverts neoliberal enclosures on an everyday basis. _x000D_
In effect, I underscore everyday political subjectivities and unintended consequences of nostalgic imaginaries and gestures, so as to explore place-related meanings in the formation of political imaginaries. To do so, drawing on more than thirty in-depth interviews conducted with residents of rapidly changing neighbourhoods of Izmir, the largest city in Turkey’s Aegean region, in the summer of 2021, I reveal transformative potentialities of nostalgia from the vantage point of a place-based politics.

Fırat Genç
Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of Sociology

ID Abstract: 475