Rethinking the Legacies of the 1923 Exchange in the Civilizationist Present | Aslı Iğsız

The centennial of the 1923 exchange between Muslims in Greece and the Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. To commemorate, various events have been organized to address the exchange from different perspectives, such as the lens of the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic and/or the Lausanne Convention, or the cultural memory of the exchanged populations. This talk will situate the legacies of this exchange in the contemporary world context, and consider the politics of memory by questioning what the "commemoration" of the exchange entails in the "civilizationist" present.

Aslı Iğsız is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her research interests include political violence, eugenics, humanism, spatial segregation and forced migration, and cultural policy. Her first book Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford University Press) was published in 2018. Humanism in Ruins sought to offer a critique of liberalism from the angle of the management of difference, and explored the underlying racialized logics of population transfers, partitions, segregation, apartheid, and border walls. Currently she is working on a new project on the notion of civilizationism in the contemporary world context. Iğsız was previously a member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.