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Singing turkish, performing Turkishness| Message and audience in the song competition of the international Turkish olympiad

<p> Turkey's most controversial religious figure is the Muslim cleric and author Fethullah G&uuml;len, whose followers have established around one thousand schools in 135 countries. Since 2003, the G&uuml;len-affiliated educational non-profit T&Uuml;RK&Ccedil;EDER has organized the International Turkish Olympiad, a competition for children enrolled in the G&uuml;len schools. The showpiece of this event is its song contest, in which students perform well-known Turkish songs before live audiences of thousands in cities all over Turkey and reach millions more via television broadcasts and the Internet. While the contest resembles American Idol in its focus on individual singers and Eurovision in its nationalistic overtones, the fact that the singers are performing songs associated with a nationality not their own raises intriguing questions about the intended message of the competition as well as about its publics. To answer these questions, I analyzed YouTube videos of the competition and examined YouTube comments, popular websites, and newspaper opinion columns. I conclude that the performers themselves are meant to feel an affinity with Turkish culture and values, while Turkish audiences receive a demonstration that G&uuml;len's brand of Islam is compatible with Turkish nationalism. Moreover, the competition reaches a multiplicity of publics both within and beyond Turkey. While some of these can be characterized as essentially oppositional counterpublics, I find that, in the case of the Turkish Olympiad, the dichotomy between rational public and emotional or irrational counterpublic established collectively by such theorists of publics as J&uuml;rgen Habermas and Michael Warner begins to break down.</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:1589575
Date17 June 2015
CreatorsWulfsberg, Joanna Christine
PublisherThe University of Arizona
Source SetsProQuest.com
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typethesis

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