Humanism in Ruins is a brilliant, path-breaking book. In a series of interlocking essays, Asli Igsiz examines the interrelatedness of liberal cultural politics and segregative biopolitics (roughly defined as population management on the basis of religious or ethnic difference). She does this by using the 1923 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey—a compulsory religious minority exchange of one and a half million Muslims and Greek Orthodox who left their homes in the wake of World War I compelled to start their lives anew—and its legacies as a case study. The book is far ranging, moving temporally through a century, geographically across continents, theoretically among a diverse group of innovative thinkers, and empirically between a rich reservoir of sources. In this way, Igsiz makes major interventions into debates on liberalism, culture, and politics. And for those who have been decrying the paucity of works on race in Middle East studies, this book is a very welcome addition.

Humanism in Ruins does not so much revisit the details of the 1923 population exchange as look at its longer-term implications. The work considers how the Turkish–Greek exchange became a model for the future and the ways in which “segregative biopolitics still continues to inform minority, refugee, and immigrant management, generating ongoing ruination” (p. 27). To be clear, if you are looking for a simple, easy-to-read empirical history of the Greek–Turkish population exchange, this may not be the book for you. Rather, this is a sophisticated account of the liberal underpinning of population exchanges and of notions of humanism. What the book does, then, is enrich and complement traditional histories of population exchange through its interdisciplinarity and engagement with theory, providing much that historians and others will learn from.

Throughout the book, Igsiz draws on a rich array of literary, visual, and oral sources, demonstrating a nimble acuity. Her sources range from newspapers, court documents, memoirs, reports, and correspondence to interviews, museum visits, and films and beyond. She weaves in fascinating detail about the descendants of individuals and families caught up in the 1923 exchange, exploring the multivalenced meaning of ruins. Along the way, many academic, international, and state institutions come under scrutiny. The work sets out to “demystify liberal humanism in all its guises and raise questions about justice” (p. 37). Grounded in the framework of cultural studies mapped by Stuart Hall, the work draws from Michel Foucault's biopolitics, Michael Werner and Benedicte Zimmermann's histoire croisee, and Gerard Genette's concept of palimpsests. Humanism in Ruins is multidisciplinary—or cross-disciplinary—engaging critically with anthropology, history, politics, and cultural and literary studies. It is a work that should be read by practitioners in all those fields and others in the academy.

The book is neatly divided into three parts. The first focuses on the period following World War II, starting with an examination of the European Association for the Study of Refugee Problems (AER), whose president, Fahreddin Kerim Gokay, governor and mayor of Istanbul (1949–57), was a leading eugenicist in Turkey. That an organization whose mission was to ameliorate the pain of refugees turned to eugenicists for leadership and guidance shows the contradictions in humanitarian discourses and practices. This darker underbelly of history, the tangled pasts of humanist organizations, is exactly what Igsiz would like us to see. The charge of the book is to push beyond depoliticized slogans of peace and coexistence and look at deeper political issues and the categorization of populations, the balance between a discourse of shared humanity and racialized differences.

In assessing the production of knowledge on race, integration, and humanity, Igsiz turns to institutions involved in producing various forms of knowledge, such as the AER (mentioned above) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). She sets her sights on The Family of Man exhibit sponsored by UNESCO in the 1950s, part of its “unity in diversity” initiative. Showing the inconsistencies between cultural policy and political actions, she argues, “While liberal humanism discursively unifies racialized genealogies around one big family of humanity, segregative biopolitics continues to classify human beings and to redistribute them spatially” (pp. 80–81). She challenges the sort of thinking that endorses segregative biopolitics, which are deployed to avoid conflict but whose underpinnings and aftershocks remain unexamined. In reviewing the history of the exhibit, which toured the world and became iconic, she shows how images are decontextualized, dehistoricized, and depoliticized, paying particular attention to the ways in which labor exploitation is glossed over.

The second part of the book moves into the early 21st century. Here we meet some of the descendants of the population exchange of 1923 and learn about their home museums, heritage trips, and oral histories. The ruins of the title—whether objects, artifacts, buildings, testimonies, or food—all figure here. The stories of descendants are embedded in the cultural terrain as individual tales or family histories but are not recognized, according to Igsiz, as a worthy basis for economic or political rights or restitution demands. She demonstrates how the 1923 population exchange laid the groundwork for the Turkish–Islamic synthesis developed under the military regime in the 1980s, promoting an understanding of the Turkish past that negates minorities. Tools used “include policing Turkish genealogy and ancestry or attempts at discrediting an individual, especially public figures or political dissidents, through public statements on ‘origins’ …. Such racist approaches also highlight the ‘bloodline’ as a means of explicating an act or figure deemed to be unpopular” (p. 126). She points to “the biopolitical infrastructure, and its relation to liberal cultural discourses, that have the potential to turn even the most laudable efforts into a racist policing of origins” (p. 128).

Yet it is not just liberal humanism which undergoes dissection here. Igsiz examines “historicist humanism,” tracing how it was built upon classical ideas of “national genius” and “developed together with racial theories in the modern era that traced the genealogies of racialized civilizations” (p. 145). Igsiz is especially concerned with justice and wonders whether it can be attained without addressing the past. She argues that the failure to grapple with the “biopolitical infrastructures of liberal cultural politics” generates and sustains the illusion of a liberalism capable of transcending its own origins with the promise of emancipation (p. 169). In fact, she demonstrates the ways in which the liberal impulse to categorize, manage, and regulate bodies through segregative politics persists in shaping the present and impacting millions.

The third part of the book looks at the contemporary cultural policies of liberal multiculturalism. One of the themes that Igsiz develops is the “museumization of culture” (p.176), about which she raises a series of questions: What informs official categorizations of culture? What does it mean to officially endorse and celebrate diversity without historicizing or contextualizing it by, for example, looking at confiscation of property, violence and mass murder, and forced disappearances? What is the impact of aestheticizing diversity and making communities material for consumption? What informs the discourse of tolerance in Turkey?

To answer such questions, we are taken on a tour of the Population Exchange Museum, meet members of the Foundation of Lausanne Treaty Emigrants in Turkey, and get a snapshot of the 1983 Turkish National Cultural Policy Report. We learn about neo-Ottomanism, an official state discourse that has been reconfigured as a model of coexistence, in which Ottoman diversity has been appropriated by the state “to market Turkey as a brand” (p. 201). And we revisit the Turkish–Islamic Synthesis, “a narrative of brotherhood informed by racialized thinking and religion” (p. 213), whose purpose is “to unite, develop, and raise economically productive citizens” (p. 217), but while celebrating diversity, ignores diversity among Muslims and at the same time configures non-Muslim citizens as foreign. Igsiz argues that the celebration of cultural diversity, which makes the previously unseen visible, does not necessarily lead to equal recognition unless social, economic, and political rights are addressed. She does not criticize diversity and memory projects so much as the limits of multiculturalism and the ways in which diversity is “capitalized, commodified, and put on display” (p. 233).

There is much to digest in this fascinating and highly original work, so much that it is hard to do justice to it in a short review. In richly textured language, Humanism in Ruins delves critically into Turkey's past and present, and there will be many who will take issue with the mirror that Igsiz holds up. Yet this is not just a story about Turkey. Given the rise of white nationalism in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, the work has invaluable insights for those who are trying to make sense of the pervasiveness of racialized thinking and segregative biopolitics today. With multiculturalism having gained traction in certain quarters, making visible individuals and families whose stories of (sometimes forced) migration and mobility were previously silenced, efforts to separate people have taken more insidious forms. Gentrification and social and economic inequity have led to racialized poverty, criminalization and incarceration, segregation and the building of walls. Igsiz's call to look at the logics underlying segregative biopolitics resonates and could not be more timely.