Dangerous Cosmopolitanism: Erasing Difference in Istanbul

Abstract

If, as is widely argued, we live in a cosmopolitan moment, the processes of cosmopolitanization are sometimes fraught with danger. Describing contexts in which cosmopolitanism is censored, this article considers recursive erasures of difference in Turkish-Jewish architecture, bodily marking, and language that highlight this sense of dangerous cosmopolitanism. This scenario complicates the popular notion that cosmopolitanism requires public nomination of difference; instead, cosmopolitanism is sometimes observable only by accounting for knowledge of what should be kept private. Without a fundamental examination of the production and interpretation of knowledge of difference, reckonings of lived cosmopolitanism are incomplete.

Development Mobilities: Identity and Authority in an Angolan Development Programme

“…Additionally, the skills and knowledge of the cosmopolite may accrue more to those visited than to those visiting (Hawkins 2010; Notar 2008; Salazar 2010). Finally, the foreign may be—may originate or stay—literally next door (Brink-Danan 2011; Grant 2010). Recent work has uncovered a Eurocentric view in the literature, and part of the stream of adjectivised cosmopolitanisms (Holton 2009: Appendix 1) has been to make the point that we must distinguish among many cosmopolitans, not continue a fiction of one universal cosmopolitanism (Harvey 2009).…”

Immersive invisibility in the settler‐colonial city:

“…The settler‐colonial character of Tel Aviv's ethnoliberalism means that Azhar's avoidance of politics at work differs from the practices of stigmatized minorities who simply keep a low profile in cities with failing cosmopolitanisms (Brink‐Danan ). As citizens of a Jewish state, Palestinians are exiles at home who live in a condition of permanent political displacement, which creates tensions between identity and space (Hackl , 64).…”

Between neo-Ottomanism and Ottomania: navigating state-led and popular cultural representations of the past

“… 21 See Marcy Brink-Danan, “Dangerous Cosmopolitanism: Erasing Difference in İstanbul,” Anthropological Quarterly 84, no. 2 (2011): 439–473; Marcy Brink-Danan, Jewish Life in Twenty-First-Century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Amy Mills, “The Ottoman Legacy: Urban Geographies, National Imaginaries, and Global Discourses of Tolerance,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no. 1 (2011): 183–195; Amy Mills, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in İstanbul (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Karen Barkey, “Rethinking Ottoman Management of Diversity: What Can We Learn for Modern Turkey?” in Democracy, Islam and Secularism in Turkey , ed.…”