for MSP and Akıncı (its youth wing) activists. Places and people were singular, and nomenclature expressed ownership, as well as actual or admired social practices. For example, according to Metiner (2008: 73), Muslim activists named Diriliş coffeehouse after the book Diriliş neslinin amentüsü (Creed of a reborn generation), by the writer and poet Sezai Karakoç.
Steve Feld stresses the affective dimensions of place names: “Because [they] are fundamental to the description and expression of experiential realities, these names are deeply linked to the embodied sensation of places” (1996: 113). After the coup the junta changed May 1st, the Ümraniye shantytown settled and named by its militant residents, to Mustafa Kemal. In the city of a thousand killings it is the name of each dead activist—Şahin Aydın or Metin Yüksel—that makes them particular persons, grieved for by those who knew or loved them.
We will see how else we may gain a sense of the city, and of how it was sensed by its politicized inhabitants, in chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7, as well as in readings from newspapers and other archival material.9 The primary source of this sense of their city is the activists’ own accounts of their emplaced experiences and memories of Istanbul in the years before and after 12 Eylül. Analysis of them attests to activists’ own projects of spatial politics and production. Further, militants’ generation of space occurred not only through their labor in the constructing of roads and houses in politically sympathetic shanty towns, but also in their theatrically embodied gestures, choreographed movements, and noisy exchanges in urban space, and in their symbolic, affective, and imaginative relations with it. This focus on activists’ perceptions, urban knowledge, projects, and place-creation—for example through reverberating revolutionary songs—adds a complementary and much needed empirical dimension to the political economy and political science perspectives, while facilitating a necessary critique of the claims of the junta. It also enables us to learn from practitioners about the practicalities, potentialities, limitations, and pitfalls of urban activism.
Research Practices
Here let me briefly describe the central dimensions of the research process itself. Alongside written sources, the key material analyzed in this book derives from extensive interviews with ex-militants, which sought to facilitate autobiographical reflection upon their earlier selves and actions and upon the city (and its places) that co-constituted them. Over a dispersed period of nearly twelve months in 2009 and 2010, and then more briefly again in 2011, 2013, and 2014, I met with more than fifty people, men and women, from a variety of political organizations, including with militants from the violently anti-communist Nationalist Action Party (MHP). However, as will become clear in the book, there is a discrepancy in interview numbers between leftists and rightists that is reflected in the much greater depth of material on leftist practices, ideologies, activists, and (f)actions. Interviews often ran for two or three hours, and in many cases resulted in follow-up sessions. Interviewees ranged in age from forty-six to fifty-five, and were working in a number of areas, including journalism, television, unions, education, or in their own businesses. Many were still politically active in new associations. Interviewees were storytellers, presenting their versions of events. They were very interested in the perceptions of ex-revolutionaries (devrimciler) in organizations other than their own—a curiosity that was discouraged at the time, given antagonisms between groups. Indeed, one of their concerns was whether this study would do justice to militants’ variety of experiences, given interviewees’ realization of the particularity of the parts of the city they had been familiar with, as well as their intuition of political and socioeconomic differences between militants of different factions.
In the vast majority of cases, interviewees had been youthful members of a number of different organizations or factions from Turkish socialism’s three major branches, the pro-Soviet factions (including the TKP); the Maoist sects (including HK); and more Latin American–inspired nonaligned groups, including Dev-Yol and Devrimci Sol (Revolutionary Left). In fact, over the decade of the 1970s as many as forty-five radical leftist groups were active. Interviewees recalled an intense factionalism and rivalry between leftist organizations for influence and initiative in urban militancy, detailing how certain groups refused joint cause with others, or even fought each other over a killing or an assault (see chapter 6). Violent conflict between leftist factions and between leftists and rightist groups was also connected to struggles over control of place. Official positions in the center of communism (USSR/China) had an effect on Turkish leftists too, with militants describing how political and ideological differences between factions were reinforced by minor nuances in clothing and style.
Despite this, militants’ descriptions of their experiences revealed a common stock of performative spatial tactics shared across nearly all groups, including protests, strikes, sit-ins, revolutionary culture (theater, music), pirate speechmaking (on trains or in the cinema), marking and occupation of places, slum mobilization, organizational separatism, and ready recourse to violence (see chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6). None of these groups, with the exception of the MHP and the PKK (Partiya Kakeren Kurdistane [Kurdistan Workers Party]), exist in the present; although there are renamed organizations that trace their lineage back to the movements of the late 1960s and ’70s.
Istanbul, City of the Fearless is also a study of memories. Even as activists recounted “raw” experience (things as they were or as they happened), in our conversations, both my leading questions and interviewees’ present interests and intentions led them to foreground certain memories of spatial practices and the city and to relegate others to the “fringes” of consciousness. In this reassembling and new contextualizing of past memories, concern over the absolute veracity of activists’ descriptions misses the way that in interviews telling is also a performance, as the literature on the constructive nature of remembering explores (Saunders and Aghaie 2005, Casey 1987). “I’m warmed up now,” said Ulvi (MHP) as we spoke, “everything is fresh in my mind.”
Indeed, in asking activists to attentively describe the sounds, appearances, and textures of the social environment in Istanbul, the interview process facilitated their reimagining of perception, as well as providing an opportunity to reorder memories in the present. “When the image is new, the world is new,” says Bachelard (1994: 47). Careful description of a thing, an emotion or a relationship possesses a generative dimension. As Bachelard muses in The Poetics of Space, “Often when we think we are describing we merely imagine” (120). Equally significantly, ex-partisans’ memories of Istanbul have been dynamically and ceaselessly reconstituted in the relational context of their ongoing engagements with the city’s social and political worlds. As Lambek notes in describing people’s ethical memories, specific incidents are located “within the stream of particular lives and the narratives that are constituted from them, changing its valence in relation to the further unfolding of those lives and narratives and never fully determined or predictable” (2010: 4). In the event of the interview, then, activists were able to engage in an act of “phenomenological modification” (Husserl 1962), taking up new perspectives, attitudes, and feelings toward people and events forgotten or perceived as having little significance at the time. Their new insights into the social relationships of the day have informed my own tentative, more synthetic, analysis.
I count this synthesis as classic ethnography, in that genre’s most literal and basic sense: a crafted description (grapho) about people (ethnos), and more specifically about a class of people distinguished by their practices—activism—and their memories and understandings of Istanbul in the years immediately before and after the coup. Following Basso, we might also aptly call it a study of “lived topography” (Basso 1996: 58). It is ethnography in another sense also. It does not aim, through the empirical material and situation presented, to illuminate or progress any theoretical “problem” confounding or animating current debates within the academy. By contrast I prefer to engage with social theory in a more “micro” fashion—drawing out theoretical implications from activist practice and context, and using theory to illuminate aspects of those
