Book review: Vital Memory and Affect: Living with a Difficult Past

Abstract

Ozlem Koksal’s book focuses on the representation of minorities in Turkish cinema from a transnational perspective. The book examines recent filmic explorations of the three large minorities that disappeared from Turkey after World War I and with the establishment of Turkish Republic in the 1920s: the Greek, Jewish and Armenian minorities. The book also looks at films that depict a Muslim ethnic minority community, the Kurds, who were suppressed until the 1990s and found their cinematic representation in post-1990 cinema in Turkey. Koksal calls for the definition of a new ‘aesthetics of displacement’ through the selection of post-1990 transnational films on Turkish minorities that focus on remembering the moves from the home of the past to the home of the present.