Beyoğlu/Pera as a translating site in Istanbul

Abstract

In this article the Beyoğlu/Pera district, heart of cosmopolitan Istanbul, is conceived as a site of “interculture”, of interaction, involving a nexus of translators and publishers from different ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. To explore the making of new culture repertoires replacing those dominant in the early years of the Turkish nation state, the context is set with a brief history of the social/political/cultural change in Istanbul, before and after the 1990s. Here, “interculture” gains urban concreteness, enabling analyses of multiple translating/publishing practices which concern specifically Armenian and Kurdish “minority” cultures and languages of Turkey, as well as Turkish. Discourses are foregrounded to illuminate (a) aspects of the translators'/publishers' habitus regarding current resistance to patterns set by the dominant discourse, and (b) the agents' intentions to work for change in creating new spaces of inter-communication and interaction, opening closed societies and standing against “structured” differences among ethnic and linguistic collectivities that operate in the same area of Istanbul.