KEYMAN MODERN TURKISH STUDIES PROGRAM

Keyman Annual Conference on Turkey

Freedom and Unfreedom in James Baldwin’s Istanbul

May 30–June 1, 2025 (Istanbul)

 

Each year, the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs brings together scholars from around the world to discuss some of the most pressing issues facing Turkey from a global perspective. This year’s conference with the theme “Freedom and Unfreedom in James Baldwin’s Istanbul,” will take place over three days in Istanbul, co-hosted by Sabancı University.

 

The conference seeks to engage with African American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s extended stays in Istanbul between 1961 and 1971, what Magdalena J. Zaborowska calls in her important study of the topic his “Turkish decade.” In Turkey and the U.S. as elsewhere, this decade was a period of political unrest, cultural efflorescence, rising social movements, and geopolitical conflict in the context of the Cold War and decolonization. Focusing on Baldwin’s time in Istanbul, we invite papers that shed light on the cultural/political connections and contradictions between and across Turkey and the U.S. during this period.

 

Baldwin was fond of saying that Turkey saved his life. He came to Istanbul exhausted from the racism and violence of the U.S. and hoped to find space to write and distance enough from home to reflect anew on the entrenched dynamics of white supremacy and homophobia. Baldwin’s American passport gave him a certain freedom of mobility when abroad, while within the U.S. his blackness made him a second-class citizen and his political activism put him under constant threat of having his passport revoked. Coming to Turkey at a time when leftwing movements were on the rise and state repression grew apace, just as a powerful civil rights movement in the U.S. faced brutal suppression and assassinations, Baldwin was both inescapably connected to and contradicted dominant views in Turkey about U.S. military power and Cold War meddling.

 

Baldwin’s Turkish decade also gives us insight into shifting notions of race and sexuality across political and cultural divides. While racism and homophobia were no less prevalent in 1960s Turkey, their particular dynamics were different enough from the U.S. to allow Baldwin to reflect with some distance upon his home country. He similarly reflected in his work on the Black perspective on Euro-American culture and history in a way that resonated with Turkey. As he wrote in Notes of a Native Son, having roots not in Europe but in Africa meant that he approached everything from Shakespeare to Bach differently than a white American would. Within Turkey’s own complicated inside/outside relationship to Western European culture after an extended period of Westernizing and modernizing reforms from the Tanzimat to the early Republic, we see moments of overlap with Baldwin’s perspective on Western culture, especially as Turkey went from hopes of becoming a “little America” in the 1950s to growing skepticism and outright anti-Americanism during the Vietnam War amid Cold War involvement in the Mediterranean.

 

Open to papers on various aspects of Baldwin’s Turkish decade, we invite work from the multiple disciplines within Turkish and African American Studies, and welcome conversations with scholars working in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Transnational Black Studies, Global American Studies, the history of social movements, and other fields. While engaging directly with Baldwin’s life and work, possible paper topics could deal with:

• Connections and disconnects between social struggles in the U.S. and Turkey in the period

• The American passport and mobility in the context of the Global Cold War
• LGBTQI+ visibility and invisibility in 1960s Turkey (particularly queer spaces and subcultures in Istanbul)

• Bohemian life, jazz music, and the entertainment sector in Istanbul
• African American and Afro-Turk encounters and exchanges
• Racism and whiteness in Turkey
• Comparative legacies of racialization across the experiences of Black American and ethnic/religious minorities in Turkey
• The difference between exile and expatriate experiences
• Orientalism in the work of American expatriate/exile writers in Turkey and the wider MENA region

 

With a variety of interdisciplinary and comparative papers, we hope to encourage lively discussions considering Baldwin’s Turkish decade in a way that is productive multiple approaches to thinking through themes of freedom and unfreedom across Turkey and the U.S. in the period.

 

Conveners: Kenan Behzat Sharpe & İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu

 

Application details:

The Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program will provide accommodation and offer subsidies for travel expenses to scholars who do not have access to support from their institutions. To apply, please send a 150-word abstract of your paper; a proposal of not more than 700 words; and your current CV to turkishstudies@northwestern.edu by February 24, 2025. Please name your files SurnameName_Abstract, SurnameName_Proposal, and SurnameName_CV, and include “Keyman Conference” in the subject line.