Exnominating Turk, Hypernominating çingene

Abstract

The dramatic political shift from the Ottoman Imperial polity to that of an ethnonational state was implemented by creating the “Turk” as the singular subject citizen of the new Republic. To shore up a new national identity through contrast against non-Turkish others, culture power holders deployed musical discourses that effectively folded in qualities and attributes of “non-Turkish others” into the representations of çingene and negative evaluations of Romani musical labor. This strategy enabled “others” to disappear on the one hand and to hypermark çingene as the epitome of alterity against which Turkish music could be positively valued. This complex set of processes enabled the creation of Turkish folk and classical genres as legitimated categories, which formed the basis of a national musical canon. Against these structural political and cultural transformations, a critical reading of biographies and melancholy reminiscences about Romani artists Nasip Hanım and Tahsin Bey discloses the extraordinary and yet everyday contributions of professional Romani musicians. These artists mediated class and ethnic differences while maintaining musical practices that were undergoing dramatic cultural management.