Reading, Hegemony and Counterhegemony in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic

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This chapter is an attempt to come to terms with one aspect of the relationship between learning to read and reading and the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic, namely, the extent to which market forces undermined the dominant educational discourse. It grows out of my previous work on state and education in the late Ottoman period and education and autobiography that spanned the Ottoman and Republican eras.2 The question of reading affords the opportunity to get beyond the orbit of the state that dominates Ottoman and Turkish historiography. For it is the state that both monopolizes the history (dictating its periodization, setting its agenda) and provides (through its archives, its decrees and the writings of its ranking personnel) much of the source material upon which this history is based. Indeed, the central question for the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century was the unrepentantly state-centred, ‘How can this state be saved?’ In the frenetic, increasingly violent Young Turk, or Second Constitutional, era the focus of politics was on capturing the state and its ever-increasing powers and reach. The early Republic of Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, represented the ultimate expression of the centralizing, self-aggrandizing single-party governmental apparatus whose agenda included ‘statism’ among its ‘Six Arrows’.3 KeywordsReading MaterialYoung ReaderTurkish RepublicMath LessonRepublican PeriodThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.