‘Sentimentalism has a bad name’, Martin Stokes notes near the end of his new book (p. 187). Arguing against the modernist assumption that sentimentalism, including (or even especially) sentimentalism in music, represents an excess or surplus of affect that hinders rational, effective communication, Stokes suggests in this book that sentimentalism and affect as cultural idiom should be taken seriously and recognised as a site for the production of powerfully embodied meaning and significance.

The evocatively titled The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music is the culmination of two decades of continued work on Turkish popular music since Stokes' The Arabesk Debate was published in 1992. This book covers a much broader swath of Turkish musical genres and a longer historical period, providing what Stokes characterises as a cultural history of Turkey since 1950, told through its popular musics. Followers of Stokes' work published in various journals and edited volumes over the last decade or so may recognise much of the material here. But this is much more than simply a ‘book of the papers’, as the arguments are significantly expanded, new or different musical examples are discussed, and all is coherently integrated into a larger argument about how popular music has worked to construct intimate publics in Turkey since the 1950s. Building on recent theorisation of the role of popular culture in the creation of ‘counter-publics’, Stokes suggests that popular music in Turkey has played a crucial role in shaping ‘an intimate, as opposed to official, idea of the nation’ (p. 16).

While drawing on recent cultural theory that crosscuts the often artificial divisions between the social sciences and the humanities, within the overall trajectory of Stokes' scholarship on Turkish music, this book represents something of a move from a more anthropological, fieldwork-based social scientific approach to an approach grounded more firmly in humanistic, interpretive music history through the analysis of musical texts and their social and cultural contexts. Each of the three central chapters follows a similar format, being focused on a single performer – queer nightclub singer Zeki Müren, pioneer of the arabesk genre Orhan Gencebay, and pop diva Sezen Aksu, respectively. For each singer, Stokes provides a capsule biography of the artist with a focus on a period in which he or she had particular importance in the Turkish cultural landscape (the 1950s, the 1970s, and the 1990s, respectively), a discussion of cultural, social and political developments relevant to the interpretation of the artist's work during those periods, an analysis of a musical text central to the artist's oeuvre, and some discussion of the reception of the artist's work. These three chapters thus create a narrative about the intertwining of political and cultural transformations in Turkey since the 1950s, and collectively argue that music has played an important role in these transformations. While the specifics of the cultural politics of each period may differ, the common denominator uniting them all is the processes through which aesthetic values become civic values and virtues.

Chapter 5 shifts the format from a focus on individual musicians to a discussion of three different recorded versions of a single song, ‘Aziz Istanbul’ (Beloved Istanbul); Stokes describes the three versions as being ‘in conversation with each other’ (p. 179). The comparative approach to different performances, from different decades, of what is ostensibly the same musical ‘text’ allows Stokes to trace in a somewhat different way from the previous chapters transformations in how culturally defined idioms of emotional experience come to be articulated through music. The different recorded versions of the song articulate emotional subject positions complexly related to the politics of particular historical moments. As in the examples discussed in the other chapters, Stokes takes the reader deep into the textual and musical poetics of the different performances, illustrating how they each embody a different imagination of the connections between love and civility, and a correspondingly different intimate sense of national identity.

Stokes draws eclectically from various theoretical approaches to cultural intimacy and cultural idioms of emotion, including the work of Michael Herzfeld, Lauren Berlant and Anthony Giddens. Stokes' agenda here is not to rigorously theorise cultural intimacy and apply a unitary conception of it throughout the book; he does not spend a lot of time trying to reconcile contradictions or smooth out possible frictions between the different theoretical approaches that he draws on. He rather uses the concept of cultural intimacy as a flexible resource for exploring interpretive possibilities in the materials he discusses. Herzfeld's emphasis on ‘external embarrassment’ and ‘rueful self-recognition’ (p. 33) is thus more useful when discussing the performances of queer nightclub singer Zeki Müren or the popular genre arabesk, while Berlant's discussion of ‘emotion and sexuality as neoliberal civility’ (p. 111) becomes a resource when discussing the 1990s pop of Sezen Aksu.

One can only cover so much territory in a book like this, ranging widely as it does over different musical genres and covering several decades of history, so there are many areas remaining to be explored in future work that builds on the solid foundation established here. As Stokes readily acknowledges, this is very much a city-based (specifically focused on Istanbul) account of Turkish popular music; one wonders what Turkish citizens outside the metropolis make of the citizen-subject positions musically offered by self-consciously urbane, cosmopolitan figures such as Müren, Aksu and Timur Selçuk. An account of class differences in the reception of the artists discussed here would also nuance the argument; Stokes seems to assume most of the time an educated, bourgeois listening subject. The transformations in the intimate modes of citizenship described by Stokes most certainly resonate with the urban middle class emergent since the 1950s, but how are they received and negotiated among the vast population of the urban working poor? The answers to questions such as these probably cannot be found in the archive of written texts (published biographies, newspapers, music magazines, CD and cassette liner notes, websites) Stokes primarily draws on, and will instead require ethnographic fieldwork from a new generation of researchers on Turkish popular music.

While a CD of the performances discussed is not included with the book (probably due to the complexities of licensing so many commercial recordings from the many different publishers), Stokes usefully notes when the recordings discussed can be found on the Internet at websites such as YouTube.

Editors' Note

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The Editors