Beyond Turkey's Borders: Long-distance Kemalism, State Politics and the Turkish Diaspora.

• Author: Azak, Umut
• Position: Book review

Beyond Turkey's Borders: Long-distance Kemalism, State Politics and the Turkish Diaspora

By Banu Senay London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013, 322 pages, ISBN 9781780760872.

BEYOND TURKEY'S Borders is based on Banu Senay's PhD dissertation, which is an ethnographic study of Kemalism among migrant Turks in Australia. Senay conducted her fieldwork in Sydney in 2007 and 2008 among Turkish migrants who have settled there since the late 1960s. She draws her material largely from formal and informal interviews with first- and second-generation migrants, as well as Turkish and Australian state officials. She also performs content analysis of relevant community papers' archives and contemporary visual and textual materials, such as political speeches, cartoons, internet blogs, etc., produced, shared or followed by the migrant actors of "trans-Kemalism."

Senay's study of "trans-Kemalism," which she defines as "the cross border work of the Turkish state in its ceaseless secular-nationalist (Turkist) project of reconfiguring its 'civil society' abroad" (p. 105), is an original contribution to existing studies of Turkish nationalism and secularism, as well as literature on transnational mobilization of migrant communities and transnational citizenship.

The originality of the book for the students of Turkish nationalism/secularism stems first from its methodology. The pioneering examples of ethnographic research on (neo-) Kemalism were given by Yael Navaro-Yashin (Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, 2002) and Esra Ozyurek (Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey, 2006). Senay extends the scope of this literature to the diasporic sphere and analyzes the transnational mechanisms, organizations and institutions that enable the reproduction and refashioning of Kemalism in the context of the increasing dominance of political Islam in both Turkey and among diaspora Turks.

Senay's study also enriches the existing literature on the Turkish diaspora. She analyzes how transnational networks can serve to strengthen migrants' ties with the Turkish state. She explores those migrants who identify with the Turkish state and become the latter's "voluntary ambassadors" in the name Kemalist nationalism and secularism within Australian civil society. This transplanted "civil" Kemalism is being reproduced, as shown by Senay, through two mechanisms: 1) The organizations and activities of Turkish consular bodies, the...