E189 | Countries, much like companies, must seek to present a certain image to the outside world in order to achieve certain political and economic goals. As our guest in this episode, Aslı Iğsız, demonstrates, this self-presentation can take the form of full-fledged marketing campaigns. In this episode, we explore the marketing policies and strategies adopted in Turkey and the broader Middle East during the past two decades and reflect on how they various match, contradict, and intersect with politics in practice.

Aslı Iğsız is Assistant Professor of Culture and Representation in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.

Chris Gratien is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University researching the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East.

Nicholas Danforth is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University studying the history of modern Turkey

Music:
Seyyan Hanım - Mazi
Debo Band - Ambassel (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Debo_Band/Live_on_WFMUs_Transpacific_Sound_Paradise_with_Bob_Weisberg_12122009/)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aronczyk, Melissa. Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Iğsız, Aslı. “Palimpsests of Multiculturalism and ‘Museumization of Culture’: The Greek-Turkish Population Exchange Museum as an Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Project.” Comparative Studies in South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Studies. (Forthcoming August 2015)

Iğsız, Aslı. “From Alliance of Civilizations to Branding the Nation: Turkish Studies, Image Wars, and Politics of Comparison in an Age of Neoliberalism.” Turkish Studies. Special Issue, “Turkish Studies from an Interdisciplinary Perspective." 15:4 (December 2014), 689-704.

Iğsız, Aslı. “Brand Turkey and the Gezi Protests: Authoritarianism in Flux, Law, and Neoliberalism,” in The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #Occupy Gezi. Ed. Umut Özkırımlı. (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan). 2014. [revised version of two previously published Jadaliyya pieces: “Brand Turkey and the Gezi Protests: Authoritarianism, Law, and Neoliberalism” Part One and Two. Jadaliyya. 12-13 July 2013].