The 12 September 1980 coup was a 'milestone' the consequences of which have been shadowing the lives of peoples of Turkey for more than thirty years. On the one hand, the coup was instrumental in the profound economic, political and social transformation of the country while, on the other, it aimed at destroying any public opposition deemed likely to jeopardise the course of this transformation . The remembrance of the period as laden with experiences of profound transformation alongside experiences of atrocity, violence, suffering and oppression constitutes the very focus of this study. In this study, I examined the memory of the coup which was experienced discrepantly by individuals and different political groups. The discrepant nature of coup experience was the result of the coup's segregation of the society into political poles representing the 'guilty', the politically 'inconvenient' and others. The shared political identities within political groups - left-wing, right-wing and non-politically affiliated - which played a constitutive role in generating different collective frames informing coup memory in the present performed the decisive role in identifying the respondents of this study. This study tackles a series of relationalities between memory and the set of guiding concepts - identity, temporality, representation(s), power and politics that designate the possibilities of contestation among memories and so forth - that are introduced - and inherent in - processes of memory construction. Although the main focus of the study is not on generation and generational memory per se, the use of generation as a category of analyses generated some useful questions regarding the historical location of the respondents, its relation to social change and, more importantly, the function of the segmentation within the generation in boundary building and identity construction processes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:617056 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Orhon, Göze |
| Publisher | University of Essex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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