Youth Theatre and the Politics of Utopianism in Late Ottoman Empire (ONLINE)

The last two decades in theatre and performance studies has been marked by a utopian turn. This literature reflects a proclivity to associate utopian politics with resistance, transgression, and progressive ideals. My presentation analyzes how the utopian performative can function as a disciplinary technology in youth theatre, where it may the serve projects that are ambivalent or antagonistic to progressive politics.
When the Turkish War of Independence started in 1919, General Kâzım Karabekir developed a militarized vocational education project in Eastern Anatolia. He recruited four thousand orphans and other poor children, mostly boys, to create what he called Gürbüzler Ordusu [The Army of Robust Children]. Karabekir dressed the children like soldiers, fed them with military rations, and made them follow a rigorous physical exercise regimen. The project aimed to integrate the children into the workforce and invest in the utopia of a powerful modern Turkish nation-state.

The Army of Robust Children was comprised mostly of Armenian and Kurdish children, but they were all raised as Sunni Muslim and Turkish. Their educational program was designed to eliminate any markers of ethnicity, including language and dialect. To this end, Karabekir employed applied education and drama-based pedagogy. The children staged patriotic plays written by Karabekir and performed marches that he composed.
My presentation analyzes how The Army of Robust Children’s theatrical performances became a site of militaristic paternal care, where the children rehearsed and performed the codes of desirable Turkish citizenship. These experiences shaped the children’s everyday performances as well as their visions for the future. My research demonstrates how orphans of mixed and ambiguous ethnic backgrounds used these performances as a site where they precariously negotiated the politics of belonging, and how their efforts ultimately failed.

Author's Biography:

I received my PhD in Performance Studies from New York University in 2016. After spending a year at NYU as a Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, I joined the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. In 2019-2020, I was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Sabancı University. My work on Turkey’s minoritarian performance cultures has recently culminated in my ERC Starting Grant project "Staging National Abjection: Theater and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas," which I conduct at Kadir Has University. I am also a playwright, dramaturg, and dramatic translator.