Barış Ünlü’s The Turkishness Contract is a very welcome addition to the newly emerging field of critical Whiteness studies in Turkey. Its original publication in Turkish in 2018 attracted much positive scholarly attention. Up until then, although Whiteness in Turkey has been discussed in relation to the Western Turkish secular-cum-Sunni-Muslim elite in political discourse (as beyaz Türkler), the concept had not yet been taken up in academic work. In this sense, Ünlü’s book is foundational to the study of Whiteness in Turkey and in other contexts in which Whiteness may not immediately seem to be relevant. As Ünlü himself mentions in the introduction, the book received some critique from leftist writers who either suggested that class was a more relevant analytic for his project, or, similar to recent writings by Wacquant and earlier work by Bourdieu, refused the relevance of a concept such as Whiteness, which they saw as relevant in North America, but not in Europe or the Middle East. Ünlü’s book demonstrates what he calls parallels between Whiteness and Turkishness by tracing histories of Ottoman reform, the Armenian Genocide, the foundations of the Turkish Republic, and the present struggles of ethnic and religious minorities to belong. He argues that the Turkishness contract is dependent on the selective exclusion of non-Muslims and non-Turkish ethnic groups through several episodes of violence that underwrite the present in Turkey.
Although the book is a translation, Ünlü extends the original with a substantial theoretical discussion of critical Whiteness studies and its relevance to understanding Turkishness. Moreover, he revised the book to make it more legible to an English-speaking audience who might not be as familiar with a critical historiography of modern Turkey.
Ünlü takes his inspiration from the Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills’s well-known work, The Racial Contract. In the book, Mills examines social contract theory and how it obscures the racial contract, which implicitly underwrites the social contract as one limited to White people. In the Introduction, Ünlü discusses Mills, along with other theorists of critical race theory and Black thought, who prompted him to understand Turkishness as an unmarked axis of privilege—even for those well-meaning Turkish people who are not necessarily nationalists—similar to White privilege. As he puts it, “Whiteness and Turkishness result from the same kind of regime of domination, not different ones. The organization of modern nation-states around racial and ethnic hierarchies, structural racism and structural Turkishness, produced both Whiteness and Turkishness” (p. 3). As he is careful to underline, Turkishness is not a monolith, intersecting with other categories of difference such as class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Similar to Whiteness, it is also a structure of feeling, which Ünlü traces very carefully through histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, where it creates feelings of supremacy, jealousy, resentment, and pride.
Starting with the chapter “Muslimness Contract,” Ünlü traces the Ottoman reform movements and the discussions around the identity of a dying empire. Should the empire embrace religious difference and hold all its subjects as equals, which created resentment among Muslims who did not want to lose their privileges, or should it instead articulate Islam as the foundational religion? Such discussions, Ünlü shows, took place not only among the Ottoman elite. Rather, these debates produced episodes of violence among different classes, both state-sponsored, such as the Armenian Genocide (1915), and local, such as the pogrom against Armenians in Çukurova in 1908. Kurdish people joined the Muslimness contract by becoming both the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the Armenian Genocide, a privilege that was rescinded to a certain extent after the foundation of the republic.
While I appreciate Ünlü’s work and its most valuable contributions, there are a couple of points I would like to raise about its theoretical framework and methodology. Ünlü carefully lays out the parallels between Whiteness and Turkishness in the book without collapsing them onto one another. He even questions the usefulness of a category such as Whiteness to discuss Turkishness, as he sees Turkishness as “historically outside of Whiteness” (p. 19). This raises the question of whether the construction of Turkishness was not coproduced precisely with reference to other Whitenesses in Europe. Given that Whiteness is a global racial formation, displacing Turkishness from its historical development risks exceptionalizing it. After all, Whiteness is not a monolith; it changes with time and space, and claims to Whiteness are always contextual. It is questionable whether an English working-class trans woman is as White as a heterosexual English White middle-class cis man. Moreover, Whiteness is articulated differently through different nationalisms. Germanness or Frenchness articulate Whiteness as well, but they are not the same thing. I would argue that Whiteness and Turkishness are not parallels but coconstructed structures with different scales of circulation. Such theorization also might shed light on Ottoman colonialism and racializing logics in circulation within the Ottoman Empire. Anthropologist Ezgi Güner’s work is especially helpful in showing how Turkishness can carry Whiteness and White supremacist ideologies embedded in it at present.
I also appreciated Ünlü’s interviews with Kurdish and Alevi persons who experienced the negative impact of the Turkishness contract firsthand. Although their experiences are illustrative of the tangible effects and affects of the contract at present, I wondered how similar themes of exclusion might have appeared in interviews with White Sunni-Muslim Turkish interlocutors who benefit from Whiteness.
These reflections are not meant to diminish the significance of Ünlü’s intervention. On the contrary, they underscore the generative potential of The Turkishness Contract to open new lines of inquiry and invite further dialogue on the historical and conceptual relationship between Turkishness and broader formations of Whiteness. The Turkishness Contract will be of great value to all scholars of modern Turkey, Whiteness, and the Ottoman Empire.
