"Karagöz is ours": İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu’s cultural revivalism and the Long Turkish Modernity

Abstract

In 1939, the Turkish scholar and art critic İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (1886-1978) spearheaded a campaign of recovery of shadow theatre plays. Known informally as Karagöz plays, these candlelit performances of flat figurines mounted on sticks had been a widespread cultural phenomenon during the Ottoman Empire, but their relevance in the newly built, progress-facing Turkish Republic was questioned by the Turkish intelligentsia. This paper examines Baltacıoğlu’s recuperation of Karagöz as part of a wider phenomenon of cultural revivalism, closely connected to local art historiographical practices that had been developed since the 1920s. These accounts, privileging notions of anachronism, historical duration and the survival of form, paired a deliberate self-orientalising vocabulary to avant-garde terminology adapted from European artistic quarters. Baltacıoğlu’s cultural intervention, whose conservative modernist attitude was politically motivated by his nationalistic beliefs, articulated the shadow theatre plays as mobile carriers of the region’s artistic memory, positioning Turkish art history on an alternative trajectory of influence, memory and progress.