Loyal and Elegant Subjects of the Sublime State
Headgear and the Multiple Dimensions of Modernizing/-ed Ottoman Identity
Dissertation
Datum der mündl. Prüfung:2016-09-24
Erschienen:2018-02-19
Betreuer:Prof. Dr. Rebekka Habermas
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Rebekka Habermas
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Christoph Herzog
Dateien
Name:Dissertation_Katja Jana_optimiert.pdf
Size:3.12Mb
Format:PDF
Zusammenfassung
Englisch
In this study I am scrutinizing the politics of dress and especially the emergence of male bourgeois dress in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Beginning with the official implementation of new dress codes, which included the introduction of the epochal fez as the modern standard within the military and the state bureaucracy, in 1826 and 1829 respectively, introduced by Mahmud II, I am looking at debates about and incidents related to appropriate headgear, especially for men. These controversies about headgear and related performative dressing acts and the regulation of dress were intertwined with the drawing of borders and projects of state- and nation-building. My focus on dress in general and male headgear in specific aims to highlight the importance of the body in the transformation of power structures and the way this was accomplished in the late Ottoman period. Headgear was a crucial means in the construction of identities and subjectivities and was employed by the state to reorganize state-subject relations, as well as by these subjects to constitute or challenge their own relation with the state. I assume that the late Ottoman politics of dress and discourses on the modernization of dress were entangled with the nascent globalization of modern male attire and its implications regarding gender, race and class. Incidents related to the regulation of dress reveal information about the interactions of various groups in certain moments and places and what was at stake when borders and identities were negotiated interdependently. The politics of dress and related practices further provide insights into the formation of modern identity and about techniques of modernity at large. Considered from a postcolonial perspective that allows to critically interrogate binary oppositions between 'the West and the Rest', especially with regard to the Ottoman realm's role in the making of the West through cultural practices, socio-economic conditions and modernization discourse.
Keywords: Ottoman History; Turkish History; dress; masculinity; postcolonial theory; nationalism; modernization; headgear; global history; bourgeois identity; gender