(Re)considering Turkish Theatre in the Republic’s Centenary

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DOI :10.26650/B/AH13.2025.002.011   IUP :10.26650/B/AH13.2025.002.011    Full Text (PDF)

Nationalist Affection in the Theatre Plays of the People’s Houses Period (1932-1951)

Esra Dicle

The 1930s was a period in which the modern and national character of the new republic was defined and spread in many areas through institutional structures such as public houses, the Turkish Historical Institution, the Turkish Language Institution, and universities. This period includes the redefinition of the community and their reproduction as citizens by the modern nation-state through severing them from their local and pre-national ties. Nationalist discourse attempts to make citizens aware of their self-identities and values that distinguish them from other nations. Accordingly, it is claimed that every nation has its own rules of etiquette, daily life practises, symbols and ceremonies, forms of art and crafts, and of course, different forms of affection. In her book titled The Cultural Politics of the Emotions, Sara Ahmed questions how some emotions become a “national attribute”. She tries to understand the mechanism of the production and diffusion of emotions directed towards “us” and the “other”. In contrast to the view that claims that emotions originate from the individual and spread to the mass and that they spread from the crowd and attract the individual, Ahmed states that emotions do not have a fixed place, they move between bodies and objects and cause changes in them. Therefore, emotions are performative. National identity is also built through these performances. Ahmed also talks about the emotionality of texts, expressing that it is necessary to think about the ways in which texts arouse and spread certain emotions and produce certain effects. In this article, I will explore how the theatre plays written during the People’s Houses period (1932-1951) in which function as a very effective tool in the construction of national identity, present the emotional repertoire of Turkishness, how these plays create and spread this emotional repertoire, and how they benefit from the stage tools to do this.


Keywords: theatre, emotions, modern nation state, People’s Houses, nationalism

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