“Between the Old and the New Turkey”

Abstract

Halide Edip Adıvar (1884–1964) was one of the most prominent women intellectuals of the last century. Her political role in the formation of the new nation has not been contested, but it was also an uneasy one. A war veteran who fought alongside Atatürk, she was in exile in the most formative years of the new republic (1924–1939), prevented from taking part in the cultural reforms. However, as this essay argues, during heryears in exile, she continued to write about the new cultural direction for the republic in ways that diverged from the approaches of Ziya Gökalp and Atatürk. This essay looks specifically at Halide Edip Adıvar’s discourses on opera in the late Ottoman Empire and the new Turkish Republic, analyzing both her continuing interest in opera as a universal art form and her views of the emerging questions of Turkish national opera as operabecame a locus for nationalist negotiations.