“The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”Footnote ¹ So wrote Walter Benjamin in 1940, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” More than seven decades after the horrors of fascism, multicultural liberalism’s promise of recognition for alterity has once again given way to segregative policies that go to drastic extremes—border walls, urban wars, detention centers, refugee camps. Straddling the discursive and institutional terrains of the management of alterity in the post-1945 world, Aslı Iğsız’s Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange is an epochal account of the knowledge of cultural history such as Benjamin demanded. Iğsız’s perceptive analysis shows how arguments both for and against diversity are in fact informed by biopolitics. Her study thus presents a unique vantage point for an examination of the limits of the key notions of liberal cultural policies.

In the book, Turkey figures as the geographical locus of a major instance of segregative biopolitics; namely, the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange. The topic is familiar for students of Turkey, as it has been the subject of many studies. Nevertheless, Iğsız’s work sheds wholly new light on the topic by specifically analyzing the exchange as part of the broader history of biopolitics in the formation of cultural policies of alterity. Throughout the book, Igsiz uses the exchange not as a historical case study as such, but rather as a critical point of departure to consider the dissemination and prevalence of racialized thinking through concepts such as genealogy, heritage, essence, and lineage.

Putting Turkey within the wider historical and institutional context of the management of alterity, Humanism in Ruins traces the entanglements of historicist humanism as a racialized paradigm of human categorization with liberal endorsements of multiculturalism. The book follows how today’s cultural policies formed out of the discussions of the integration of refugee populations in the aftermath of World War II. During this period, race as a hard category of classifying human beings was singled out as belonging to the only recently fallen fascist regimes. However, Iğsız’s analysis unearths traces of racialized thinking as a persistent paradigm in transnational efforts to integrate refugees into host countries, showing that segregative biopolitics is pervasive in such discussions: humans are classified as either wanted or unwanted based on their physical health and mental capacity.

The book’s analysis of the traces of racialist paradigms in the contemporary politics that govern diversity is based on the notion of the palimpsest. Iğsız borrows this concept from the literary critic Gérard Genette in order to argue that there are traces of earlier texts in new texts that render the relationality between sometimes seemingly opposite discourses, practices, and policies. Like a manuscript page that bears the palimpsests of earlier texts, key notions of cultural policy like “diversity” and “peace” do not exist in isolation. Instead, they bring the formative traces of earlier concepts like segregation and race into the contemporary cultural policies of multicultural liberalism.

Iğsız’s book is composed of three parts, with two essays in each part. These segments of the book do not follow a chronological order; rather, each one unearths a different critical moment in the production of the key concepts of managing alterity in the post-1945 world. Part I, entitled “Humanism and Its Discontents: Biopolitics, the Politics of Expertise, and the Human Family,” acquaints the reader with the key personalities and practices that shaped refugee settlement policies in the aftermath of World War II. One such personality is Corrado Gini, the Italian eugenicist widely known for the Gini coefficient. Gini was the author of the 1927 article “The Scientific Basis of Fascism,” and later served as the president of the Italian Society for Genetics and Eugenics. In her analysis, Iğsız follows Gini’s crossing over multiple institutions in order to show readers the actually blurred boundaries between the segregative biopolitics of fascism and the newly emerging liberal humanism of the post-1945 period.

The book’s focus on key personalities is also used to demonstrate the contested nature of the institutional production of cultural policies in Turkey during the Cold War. Hilmi Ziya Ülken, a prominent Turkish scholar, is another such figure. Ülken appears in several places throughout the book, first as the person who invited Gini to Turkey and later as one of the Turkish scholars who conceptualized the relationship between national character and civilization via formulations of genealogy, origins, and heritage that informed the cultural policies of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. In the second essay in Part I, as part of her exploration of the institutional production of cultural policies, Iğsız investigates the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) role in configuring the field of culture as a site for the promotion of peace and coexistence. Here, the author convincingly demonstrates that UNESCO’s policies of “unity in diversity” channeled post-colonial demands for equality and justice onto the plane of culture, thereby pacifying them. This “culturization” of difference created an apolitical human essence that carried traces of segregationist thinking.

Part II, entitled “Of Origins and ‘Men’: Family History, Geneaology, and Historicist Humanism Revisited,” directs Iğsız’s critical gaze onto Turkey in the late 1990s and the individual discoveries of family genealogies that lay in the ruins of the 1923 population exchange. In the first essay of this section, genealogy emerges not only as part of international humanist policy, but also as a way for ethnic and religious minorities to claim cultural identity against nationalist history making. The two essays in this section are connected by their analysis of genealogy and heritage, with the second essay focusing on earlier debates about the genealogized notions of cultural heritage that inform both the authoritarian formulations of national unity in Turkey and UNESCO’s policies of liberal humanism. Tracing how these seemingly opposed uses of genealogy argue for the particularism of the nation and the unity of humanity, Iğsız’s analysis shows that they are in fact not contradictory, but complementary. Genealogy is never an innocent examination of family histories: tracing origins via genealogies is one of the methods of identification built into historicist humanism, and therefore, regardless of whether they are utilized by nationalist history-making projects to forge the unity of the nation or to claim recognition for cultural identities, genealogies inevitably segregate human groups rather than opening spaces for coexistence.

Part III, entitled “Unity in Diversity: Culture, Social Cohesion, and Liberal Multiculturalism,” delves further into the current configurations of liberal humanism. In this section, the international background of UNESCO’s policies and the local context intersect in a museum dedicated to the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange. Thorough an intertwined analysis of the Turkish government’s neo-Ottomanist cultural policies and UNESCO’s policies of promoting diversity, Iğsız shows that international and national policies of liberal multiculturalism “culturize” differences by divorcing them from their history and context. Liberal multiculturalism grants a limited official endorsement to cultural representation, without any serious consequences for achieving social justice. The second essay in this section shows how the Turkish-Islamic synthesis engaged with genealogies and the origins of peoples in Turkey in order to forge an Islamic majority. In the fight against communism, the solution was to turn to the Islamic origins of the Turks. This section’s juxtaposition of neo-Ottomanism and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis draws our attention to the racist military legacies of neoliberal multicultural policies in Turkey.

In the book’s concluding section (albeit entitled “In Lieu of a Conclusion: Cultural Analysis in an Age of Securitarianism”), the book circles back to the discussion of the “lesser evil,” asking: should we not consider liberal multiculturalism a lesser evil in the face of authoritarianism today? Against this, Iğsız argues that choosing between state violence and cultural policies aiming for pacification via limited recognition is not the right way of asking the question. Reminding us of Benjamin’s piercing yet precise formulation, “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,”Footnote ² Iğsız urges us to look for the ruins that are the results of such barbarism—population exchange is the specific example she uses—and atop which the cultural policies of liberalism are raised. Liberal forms of multiculturalism and authoritative forms of segregative policies are never truly separable. They are not true alternatives, but different yet continuous façades of a governmentality that exerts its power through land appropriation, imperialism, and market expansion.

Humanism in Ruins rests its analysis on the complexity of the various intertwining discourses of managing alterity as a legacy of the unmixing of populations, which was defended as a “lesser evil.” In Turkey, late Ottoman and early republican history have numerous other instances that were not defended as “lesser” evils, but rather as “necessary” evils required for national security, with perhaps the most prominent example being the Armenian genocide of 1915. The “lesser” and “necessary” evils of these years created the ruins that today the management of diversity seeks to govern. Humanism in Ruins is an excellent and complex analysis of the racist legacies of population exchanges in modern-day cultural policies. Hopefully, it will pave the way for similar studies analyzing how soft and hard policies, cultural integration and violence, and population exchange and genocide all work together in the formation of the management of alterity today.