Let’s start with your first book, Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey by Deniz Kandiyoti & Ayse Saktanber. 

This is one of my favourite books and an excellent gateway to Turkey’s social, cultural, and political complexity. It is composed of numerous articles by leading scholars in different fields and is therefore, quite multi-disciplinary. Herein you will read well-observed and well-analysed essays on a variety of subjects, ranging from language to cinema, black humour to the globalised new middle class. When it was first published it was a true groundbreaker and is today still very relevant and informative. 

There are two other reasons why I recommend this book. Firstly, it quite innovatively focuses on the sociology of daily life in an ever-shifting, ever-changing society. ‘Daily life’ is an area that has generally been ignored in the literature on Turkey. Many of the books about the country tend to concentrate on its political machinery, state institutions, and/or ideological formation. But as you turn the pages of this book you will feel the pulse of the society. 

Secondly, this book is gender sensitive. There is no other way to put it. There are several essays that deftly analyse the inner workings of a patriarchal society. Not only that; those identities that have been marginalised and have formed subcultures of their own, like the transsexuals of Istanbul. I would put a rainbow flag somewhere on the cover. So for me Fragments of Culture portrays a colourful, diverse, dynamic and shifting society with its many actors and conflicts.

Tell me about your next book, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey by Sibel Bozdogan & Resat Kasaba. 

Turkey has gone through a tremendous transformation after the 1980s as its state institutions, political and cultural elite and the role of the army have been opened up to discussion. Here is a book that sheds light on this bouncy journey and helps us to understand better today’s debates and conflicts. 

This is a rich, thought-provoking collection for anyone interested in the construction of a nation-state and the Turkish experiment with modernity. It is very inter-disciplinary, drawing upon fields such as history, political science, architecture, popular culture and urban planning. 

The question of how a national identity is formed, consolidated and internalised is one that preoccupies scholars and journalists alike. This book takes a close look at the formation of a collective identity, and elaborates the myriad discourses about gender, family and nation. 

The editors say their aim is not to come up with quick-fix solutions or answers, but instead make matters more complicated. And I personally like that. In doing so, they want to show the complexity and diversity of a country which is too often oversimplified by the media and populist politicians everywhere. 

There is a remark made by the editors which I find intriguing: ‘If modernity is a project fraught with uncertainty, as we believe it is – we can perhaps say this much: it is alive and well in Turkey.’

How does your next book, Colonial Fantasies by Meyda Yegenoglu, help people gain an insight into Turkey? 

Though not a book on Turkey per se, I would still recommend this to gain a better understanding of the region, the veil, and the question of ‘otherness’. 

How do we create an ‘other’? How do we construct and consolidate the discourses that make us believe ‘we’ are different and better than ‘them’? Yegenoglu elaborates the sexualised nature of Orientalism in an inventive, intelligent way. We are not used to seeing concepts such as ‘desire’ and ‘fantasy’ parading in books on the Middle East, but this book is different. 

Yegenoglu’s critical, post-feminist approach explores the western fascination with the veil and the veiled women of the east. It is not a book on contemporary politics, but I believe it helps us to understand how we can and cannot talk about the veil, which is an important and often controversial subject in Turkish, as well as the western media. 

And how does it do that? 

The writer believes we need to see how the Other is created through sexual and cultural modes of differentiation. So more than the veil per se, it is the perception of the veil that she focuses on.