Speaker
Description
Before the declaration of the Second Constitutional Regime (1908), marked with severe authoritarian prohibitions, Ottoman workers resorted to seeking their rights in rather compelling ways that attract a theatre historian’s gaze. The pre-constitutional years (1901-1902) saw the exiled labor leaders of the Ottoman Workers’ Association succeed in arranging a Labour Congress in an Istanbul cemetery (Zengin 448). The Second Constitutional declaration brought a visible but short-lived optimism and rigour to the workers’ cause as they used theatre to demonstrate their political urgencies. The Anatolian Railways Company resorted to assembling in a winter theatre house for chartering their union in Moda, a non-Muslim district (Toprak 18). In the following decade, one of the largest workers’ association meetings was held in a theatre house (Zengin 458). Although the cemeteries were recreational spaces for 19th-century Ottoman pastime (Çilli), the secrecy of the cemetery gathering makes accessing the event dynamics difficult. The theatre assemblies of workers’ unions were naturally non-performative. Still, these events call for theoretical inquiries regarding the practical freedoms they suggest: Theatre houses naturally lend themselves to the discussions of liminality, whereas the cemetery’s dubiously interstitial promise can be discussed in contradistinction to the carnivalesque spirit of a political emancipation (of chartering a forbidden union), while starkly displaying the pathos and the gothic background of Ottoman workers oppressed by their own state and imperialist companies. My paper, assuming the gaze of a theatre historian looking through a temporal fourth wall, aims to theorize these non-theatrical labor activisms as social dramaturgies responding to a crisis, and to also probe this Artaudian gaze itself that regards such generative historical acts and spaces as theatre’s double.
| Keywords | Ottoman Labor history, theatre historiography, performance, liminality, interstice |
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| bahar.karlidag@yeditepe.edu.tr |