Social Trauma and Telecinematic Memory

This book explores responses to authoritarianism in Turkish society through popular culture by examining feature films and television serials produced between 1980 and 2010 about the 1980 coup. Envisioned as an interdisciplinary study in cultural studies rather than a disciplinary work on cinema, the book advocates for an understanding of popular culture in discerning emerging narratives of nationhood. Through feature films and television serials directly dealing with the coup of 1980, the book exposes tropes and discursive continuities such as “childhood” and “the child”. It argues that these conventional tropes enable popular debates on the modern nation’s history and its myths of identity. 

“The book tries to establish how telecinematic remembrance is culturally significant as a public performance of memory. That is why it identifies not as a work on cinema, but as a project that finds its roots in cultural studies. … Acknowledging that the whole country is going through another wave of authoritarianism, Başcı ends on an explicitly hopeful note, stating that coups films also have a way of showing how top-down policies are doomed to fail.” (Can Koçak, Studies in European Cinema, May 19, 2022)

Pelin Başcı is Associate Professor of Turkish Language and Literature at Portland State University, USA, where she teaches courses on popular culture, cinema, and literature of Turkey. A recipient of various awards including a Fulbright scholarship for doctoral work, Başcı received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, with additional doctoral coursework at Ankara University, Turkey. She is author of numerous cultural studies articles and reviews on women and gender in Turkey, the late-Ottoman popular press and advertising for women, the canon of Turkish literature, and coup films as counter-narratives. Her research and teaching interests cover modern Turkish literature and popular culture, Turkish cinema, and women and gender in Turkey.