Introduction: The Price of the Exchange

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Sep 11, 2019 Turkey
Syrian refugees arrive from Turkey on a boat through sea near Molyvos, Lesbos. Image by Nicolas Economou via Shutterstock. Syrian refugees arrive from Turkey on a boat through sea near Molyvos, Lesbos. Image by Nicolas Economou via Shutterstock.

Introduction: The Price of the Exchange

By : Anthony Alessandrini

[This article is the first in a series comprising a review roundtable on Aslı Iğsız's book, Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. Click here to read Sadia Abbas' review and Elektra Kostopoulou's review.]

In the opening pages of Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, while introducing the book’s central topic, Aslı Iğsız notes: “More than ninety years ago, the same route that the Syrian refugees are taking today from Turkey’s Aegean seashores to Greece was the site of yet another human displacement en masse: the religious minority exchange between Greece and Turkey.”

This looks, at first glance, like the drawing of the sort of historical parallel with which we are all familiar. If so, it would be a powerful one, reminding us, beyond the usual marshaling of statistics under the now-common phrase “the largest refugee crisis since World War II,” of the ways in which the ghosts of the past haunt all of the routes traveled by displaced persons today.

But what makes Humanism in Ruins such an original and necessary work is that Iğsız is not merely drawing a parallel here. Instead, she finds in the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923 a means for writing a history of the present, one in which the never-ending rhetoric of “the worldwide refugee crisis” belies the fact that we have accustomed ourselves to various and horrific forms of forced migration as the daily norm.

Today’s forced migrations generally do not follow the official protocols that sanctioned the Greek-Turkish population exchange (via the Lausanne Treaty, overseen by the League of Nations). But if you follow Iğsız’s argument to its logical conclusion, we are forced to admit that our own collective relationship to forced migration today is not that dissimilar to the view voiced in the pages of Humanism in Ruins by Lord Curzon, a key architect of the Lausanne Treaty, who considered the Greek-Turkish population exchange “a thoroughly bad and vicious solution for which the world will pay a heavy price for a hundred years to come”—but, nevertheless, also the least-bad imaginable solution, and therefore the necessary one. That logic remains with us today; if anything, Curzon probably underestimated the expiration date on the price to be paid.
At the center of Iğsız’s virtuoso argument here is the suggestion that the liberal humanism that has established the global order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is built upon a ruinous foundation: 'the policies of biopolitics.'

At the center of Iğsız’s virtuoso argument here is the suggestion that the liberal humanism that has established the global order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is built upon a ruinous foundation: “the policies of biopolitics,” such as compulsory population transfers as a way of segregating different groups in the name of protecting “minorities”—what Curzon called the process of “unmixing peoples” (this theme of “unmixing,” and Curzon’s role more generally, is taken up in much greater detail by Sadia Abbas in her contribution to this review roundtable). For Iğsız, understanding our present predicament means doing the intellectual archaeology necessary to reveal liberal humanism’s taken-for-granted underpinnings, as well as the ghosts of the past that accompany us on our present routes. At the end of the book’s introduction, she asks, “What are the broader implications of liberal humanism towering upon ruins, without having necessarily addressed the biopolitics—the tenets of which are reinforced by the paradigms of historical humanism—in the making of those very ruins?” She then goes on to trace the contours of the answer her book will provide:

The problem here is not liberal humanism or multiculturalism . . . on their own, per se, but that they are built upon the policies of biopolitics, which are left unaddressed. It is because such a matrix of power tends to obscure the fact that liberal cultural politics and segregative biopolitics are two sides of the same coin in the regulation of alterity, and because unraveling this entanglement might help us reconsider the historical and political implications of a lesser-evil scenario, that I sought to write this book.

Humanism in Ruins is, as this quote suggests, a deeply ambitious book. Like all ambitious books, it is likely to be misunderstood in many quarters, at a moment when most academic books are content to scratch out their marks upon a small patch of territory. The very structure of Iğsız’s book—consisting of three parts, each containing two long essays, under the section titles “Humanism and Its Discontents: Biopolitics, the Politics of Expertise, and the Human Family”; “Of Origins and ‘Men’: Family History, Genealogy, and Historicist Humanism Revisited’;” and “Unity in Diversity: Culture, Social Cohesion, and Liberal Multiculturalism”—reveals it to be dissatisfied with working on such a small scale.

It is also an exemplary interdisciplinary text, drawing eruditely upon methods drawn from history, philosophy, political theory, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, gender studies, and critical race theory. This, sadly, is another direction from which the book might be initially misunderstood by those tied to parochial versions of more traditional disciplinary approaches.

Another way to say all this is to simply say that in Humanism in Ruins, Iğsız—who teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University—is doing the sort of work that area studies could and should do, but almost never does. In this sense too it is exemplary.

Given the book’s significance, ambition, and intellectual authority, Jadaliyya has decided to dedicate a roundtable of reviews to address Humanism in Ruins. By drawing on the views of scholars from a variety of disciplines with a range of expertise, we hope to do justice to the work being undertaken by Iğsız here. My own piece will serve as an introduction, and the roundtable will conclude with a response by the author. 

As Elektra Kostopoulou notes in her contribution to this roundtable, Humanism in Ruins does not follow a traditional narrative structure, nor does it aim to be yet another authoritative and exhaustive overview of the population exchange. Instead, in Kostopoulou’s fine phrase, the book “creates a defiant colloquy of questions.” Iğsız works by way of what she calls palimpsests, which in her analysis constitute ways of considering “the relationality between different discourses, practices, and policies.”

This means that the six essays that make up the book’s argument proceed not in a straightforward manner but by overlapping with each other, doubling back and allowing for the drawing of connections that might not otherwise become apparent. It also allows Iğsız a way out of the sorts of too-easy dichotomies that often come with this sort of large-scale work. For example, rather than simply arguing that processes of “unmixing,” as well as the policies of liberal multiculturalism that followed, are in some simple way determined by racism, she does the hard work of engaging the unmixing inherent in population transfers as “relational to racialized thinking,” which allows for a much more subtle—and, ultimately, much more convincing—argument than in some simple way trying to equate unmixing with eugenics. In this sense, Sadia Abbas’ ongoing work on the colonial and postcolonial entanglements and legacies of population transfers (especially regarding Partition), which she draws on in her review here, proves that Iğsız’s thinking in Humanism in Ruins is part of a larger and very important strand of analysis in colonial and postcolonial studies today.

This relational approach pays off most richly in her discussion of liberal humanism. “Humanism” is a perfect example of a theoretical concept that has generally forced the critic to take a side: for or against. Foucault once described what he called “the blackmail of the Enlightenment,” the seeming need to declare oneself once and for all “for” or “against” it, which inevitably leads to “a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism . . . or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality.”[1] Humanism can be seen as working through a similar form of blackmail, by forcing us to orient ourselves around it, whether we praise or condemn it. The choice presented by being “for or against humanism,” whatever our response, maintains humanism at the center of our thinking.

Iğsız comes at this problem by way of a careful but unsparing historicizing—although, as she also notes, historicizing in and of itself is not enough, since “on its own, it does not necessarily call power into question.” She accordingly coins the term historicist humanism to describe a form of human categorization, closely connected to and complicit in forms of biopolitics and emerging most strongly in nineteenth-century Europe, that presents itself as functioning in the name of “the family of man.” “Historicist humanism” is an appealingly paradoxical term, since humanism in its strongest form claims to represent that which transcends the merely historical, as the universal that stands above all particularities.

For Iğsız, historicist humanism has since at least the nineteenth century been closely bound up with more recognizably taxonomic—not to say racist—fields such as scientific racialism, physical anthropology, and eugenics. As she defines it, the term refers to “a prominent historicist approach to human categorization—unambiguously connecting ancient peoples, their literary traditions, cultures, and arts to today.” Through its various manifestations, historicist humanism has “offered a cultural framework for biological arguments on racialized origins and genealogies,” by drawing on the fields of anthropology, literary history, philology, art, and architectural history, among others. Here is another reason for the interdisciplinarity of Iğsız’s book: racism has long been an interdisciplinary endeavor, and so the intellectual and political response to it must also marshal various forms of disciplinary knowledge.

Thus, Iğsız’s argument regarding humanism does not follow the familiar route of posing historical or cultural particularism against the false universalism of humanism. Instead, she shows that historicist humanism, in fact, has been precisely a project of particularizing, in the sense of identifying, categorizing, and ultimately hierarchizing what it variously defines as cultures, civilizations, and races. In this sense, historicist humanism is deeply and directly implicated in the most horrifying processes of cultural “unmixing” of the past century, from population transfers to genocides. 

But Iğsız’s frequent references to those engaged in struggles against racism and colonization—particularly Frantz Fanon, who is a recurring figure throughout the book—also reveals Humanism in Ruins to be, like Fanon’s work, not merely an indictment of humanism but also a struggle within and over its legacy.[2] This is in turn linked to her incisive and original analysis of the role played by culture, and cultural analysis, in the dehumanizing processes of cultural “unmixing.” 

In the book’s conclusion, she links Fanon’s call for a new (decolonized) humanism with Walter Benjamin’s famous statement that every “cultural treasure” must also be understood as “a document of barbarism.”[3] Iğsız’s point is not to thereby condemn cultural analysis out of hand, of course. Instead, this link between Benjamin and Fanon leads us to better understand the necessity of Iğsız’s palimpsestic approach: 

According to Benjamin, a document of culture, which signifies a glorious moment in so-called civilization, simultaneously attests to the ruins of violence and exploitation of peoples over which its humanist value system looms. When that second segment is dismissed or ignored, it becomes easier for such an object to be appropriated by state officials or others to promote their agenda or maintain the status quo. Or when what is appropriated is culture itself, it is in the form of museumization—a modern tool of objectification and display.

As Kostopoulou notes in her review, the stringency of Iğsız’s challenge here can be unsettling, since it does not spare those essentialist uses of culture that are deployed precisely in the name of giving voice to the victims and speaking back to the victors. Indeed, Iğsız begins Part Two of the book with a visit to a home museum on the Turkish isle of Cunda. Fuat, the elderly man who set up the museum in his home, was born in Crete but left the island with his family as part of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. It is undeniably moving, knowing the psychic price of forced displacement, to read the description of Fuat’s loving display of objects related to his family: clothes, a tea set, pictures and documents. But Iğsız goes on to remind us of the way that the Turkish state, since the 1980 military coup, has been particularly adept at marshaling precisely this sort of reclaiming of “family heritage” as part of its construction and imposition of a form of Turkishness “heavily informed by an interpretation of Sunni Islam as a unifying national ideology: the Turkish-Islamic synthesis.” The toll taken by such a policy is all too clear in contemporary Turkey.

This, in fact, is the final aspect of Iğsız’s book that breaks the rules and may well prove an affront to some timid readers: rather than leaving her analysis in the comfortable realm of the abstract, or in the disavowable space of the past, she uses it to provide an unsparing analysis of contemporary Turkish politics. Put simply, she is not content to simply reveal to us the framework that has led to today’s authoritarianism: she names names. In this sense, Humanism in Ruins is closely connected to Iğsız’s previous work on what she has called “Brand Turkey” and the rise of a form of neoliberal authoritarianism under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).[4] 

More specifically, Iğsız’s analysis of the uses for which culture can be deployed in the name of authoritarianism rhymes closely with the points made recently by Sinem Adar and Halil Ibrahim Yenigün regarding what they call the “soft power” strategies deployed by Erdoğan’s regime. This includes particular forms of cultural appropriation, including pseudo-historical television shows that have proved hugely popular with a non-Turkish Muslim audience. It also includes a political and cultural outreach program aimed at members of the Turkish diaspora—which interestingly, given Iğsız’s argument, functions under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Most striking of all, and most resonant with Iğsız’s unsparing argument, is the fact that a number of these cultural efforts that are functioning to support Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime are going forward precisely in the name of fighting Islamophobia and imperialism—sometimes with the support of Western leftists.

It is thus not surprising that Aslı Iğsız has found herself, for years, under relentless attack from the Turkish state and its right-wing supporters in the media. She and her family have been subjected to death threats and media slander. As one of the signatories of the petition “We will not be a party to this crime!” published by the group Academics for Peace in 2016, she, together with many of the other signatories, currently faces the indictment of a Turkish court for the absurd charges of spreading “terrorist propaganda.”

All this leads me to assign one further adjective to Humanism in Ruins: it is intellectually, politically, and in every other sense, a truly courageous book. Like all brave books, it will strike fear into some who would prefer that certain arguments remain unarticulated. It remains to be seen which readers will, in turn, be courageous enough to take up its challenge. 

Jadaliyya is pleased to present the following roundtable on Humanism in Ruins. Links to the other articles in this roundtable can be found below.

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Notes

[1] Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 47.  It is worth noting that later in his essay, Foucault takes pains to avoid what he sees as the “facile confusion between humanism and Enlightenment.” So, I hasten to add that my point is meant only to draw a parallel between the ways these concepts exert their power upon the analyst, not to equate them with each other.

[2] For more on this point, regarding the work of Fanon and others, see my “Humanism and Its Others,” Jadaliyya (March 9, 2016). 

[3] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 2007), 256.

[4] See for example her two-part article “Brand Turkey and the Gezi Protests: Authoritarianism, Law, and Neoliberalism,” in Jadaliyya (July 12-13, 2013). A revised version of this piece can be found in "Resistance Everywhere": The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey, a special issue of JadMag, ed. Anthony Alessandrini, Nazan Üstündağ, and Emrah Yildiz (2013).

[5] See Sinem Adar and Halil Ibrahim Yenigün, “A Muslim Counter-Hegemony?: Turkey’s Soft Power Strategies and Islamophobia,” in Jadaliyya (May 6, 2019).

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Elektra Kostopoulou, “Humanism in Ruins and Possible Rebirth(s): A Bold Reconceptualization of the Compulsory 1923 Greco-Turkish Exchange of Populations”

Sadia Abbas, “Perpetual Aftermath: Colonial Histories, Partitions, and the Displacement of Populations”
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Elektra Kostopoulou By :
Elektra Kostopoulou

Humanism in Ruins and Possible Rebirth(s): A Bold Reconceptualization of the Compulsory 1923 Greco-Turkish Exchange of Populations

[This article is the part of a series comprising a review roundtable on Aslı Iğsız's book, Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. Click here to read Anthony Alessandrini's introduction and Sadia Abbas' response.]

At the start of 2019, almost eighty million people were displaced by war or violent conflict. It is virtually certain that mass population movements will continue, and it is clear that there is a pressing need to change the terms of the international debate and policy regarding the issue.

This reality deems Aslı Iğsız’s insightful book, Humanism in Ruins, to be not only timely but also an essential read.

The book uses as its main case-study the compulsory 1923 Greco-Turkish exchange of populations. Humanism in Ruins, however, does not aspire to be yet another exhaustive study of the exchange. Rather, the author undertakes the bold task of contextualizing, as well as re-conceptualizing, the “demographic management of alterity,” via a thought-provoking, kaleidoscopic discussion that pushes the boundaries of geography, politics, and methodology.

Traditionally, Turkey and Greece—the two rival nations-states de facto reborn out of the exchange—have treated the issue of the population exchange along the lines of two mutually exclusive narratives. That said, in the past two decades or so, there has been a turn towards comparative perspectives. This development has agreed perfectly with the process of Greco-Turkish reconciliation promoted by the international community and regional actors in the context of neoliberal globalization. Without diminishing the important achievements of this latter literature, one needs to recognize that it has also created its own limited and thereby limiting methodological canons. This reviewer herself has most certainly produced work shaped by the above-implied comparative stereotypes, in an effort to undermine the monopolization of history by rival nationalisms.

Humanism in Ruins, however, does not conform to this trend. It challenges liberal fallacies by revealing the multifaceted, complicated, and at times unsettling operation of top-down international liberalism in the “un-mixing” of peoples. As such, the book moves well beyond political and methodological comfort zones. It makes significant contributions to original research, but does not exhaust itself in it. The analysis is not rudimentary. This is a book that demands of readers an active role.
Aslı Iğsız invites readers to think about the politics of regulated displacement without the essentialist safety net of nostalgia, shared trauma, and uncritical reconciliation.

In a word, Aslı Iğsız invites readers to think about the politics of regulated displacement without the essentialist safety net of nostalgia, shared trauma, and uncritical reconciliation. Her decision to take such an approach is a bold one and tests the boundaries of the author herself. This becomes particularly evident in her discussion of cultural management. The author approaches the notion of original essence in cultural policy and liberal humanism through critical lenses. But aside from established hierarchy, her analysis risks also challenging the sincere need of victims themselves to seek comfort in humanism’s siren calls. This becomes particularly evident, for instance, in her analysis of the population exchange museum, as I note in my comments on Part Three of the book below.

Occasionally, in other words, the book seems to deprive its very protagonists (the exchanged ones) of cultural protection: of the luxury to reclaim shared memories, collections, oral histories, artifacts, and sounds that have been brutally oppressed. And I find this to be a most complicated, but also a worthy goal. When confronting, for instance, the canon of popular cultural discourse endorsed by UNESCO post-World War II, Humanism in Ruins risks undermining the given tools of empowerment that come with it. Yet Iğsız’s approach aims to strengthen rather than undercut equity, proposing that all victims of displacement deserve and should demand more than the essentialist management of culture within regulated contexts of conflict and reconciliation. 

The book is organized in three long parts. Part One approaches the legacies of liberal humanism critically. Moving back and forth from the population exchange and the mid-war period to post-World War II developments, the author situates Turkey in the international context and reveals the complicated durability of racialized thinking within the same organizations tasked with refugee advocacy. Among other things, her analysis casts the emblematic foundation of UNESCO under the motto “unity in diversity” in a radically new light. Other than revealing the undoubtedly Eurocentric and, thereby, selective nature of international policy, the book proposes that the racialized character of said diversity, particularly in the 1950s, confounded agency with visibility. Hence, it promoted only versions of unity that agreed with certain criteria under the patronage of international elites.

Part Two moves to the more recent issue of genealogy and origins, connecting the resurfacing of family histories in post-1990s Turkey to what the author describes as “historicist humanism.” Despite accepting that the racialized thinking of the 1950s has faded away in later decades, Iğsız problematizes the subsequent identification of identity with origins or/and with strictly defined notions of civilization. She argues that this connection has bounded past memory and present existence to the ruins of eugenics. When Lord Curzon used “unmixing” to refer to the population exchange, argues the author, the term revealed an understanding of population management deeply informed by biology. Un-mixing aimed at improving/altering the “wrongful” reality of religious coexistence. Similarly, historicist humanism would continue to encapsulate eugenics well into the 1990s, categorizing different groups of humans according to their alleged—mutually exclusive—linear histories: a mentality that connected history directly to biology, racialized origins, and genealogies.

Part Three fleshes out the above-mentioned arguments even further, focusing on the practices and rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism in contemporary Turkey. As an example, the author chooses to focus on the first museum commemorating the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange, founded in Istanbul in 2010. Again, similar to the discussion of family histories in Part Two, Part Three reveals that the author does not shy away from wrestling with an endeavor celebrated by many as an expression of the suppressed voice of the exchanged. Uneasy with the superficiality of similar appearances, Iğsız problematizes the museumization of culture and suggests that monopolized alterity limits rather than promotes agency. 

Methodologically speaking, the book does not follow a narrative structure. Instead, it creates a defiant colloquy of questions. The author situates Humanism in Ruins “at the intersections of anthropology, history, political critique, cultural and literary studies,” bridging past dynamics with present challenges. Although each section of the book is self-standing, it is easier to appreciate Humanism in Ruins as a profound addition to specialized as well as multi-disciplinary debates. Among other things, the book offers a quite original interpretation of biopolitics, or what the author calls “segregative biopolitics,” which is understood as the regulation of categorized human bodies by reference to numbers and space: a process that, in the case of the population exchange, relies heavily on genealogies of bloodline and origins.

Given that the book concentrates on Turkey, Iğsız wrestles with the superficial narrative of Greek-Turkish brotherhood, which followed the exchange. She juxtaposes it both with the violent realities of deportation and with the culmination of the conflict between the two countries and discrimination against minorities for most of the twentieth century. In the same vein, Iğsız questions the present resurgence of Greek-Turkish brotherhood in its neo-liberal guise. Wary about the alleged policy of reconciliation that has reached its climax in the past decade or so, she complicates the assumption that the curation of cultural memory is a process of mutual healing. In this sense, Iğsız’s reading of the present is as bold as is her analysis of the past. Humanism in Ruins implies that easy-to-digest notions of cultural brotherhood are equally easy to collapse. Current developments in the Eastern Mediterranean prove the author to be tragically accurate.

To sum up, Humanism in Ruins is an unsettling work. It forces the reader to abandon convenient assumptions without offering plausible intellectual solutions. Yet, according to this reviewer at least, this type of vigorous intellectual courage not only does justice to the past, but also produces scholarly space for future hope.