Postimperial Memories, Gender and Trauma in the Anthropocene: A Change of Feminist Perspective on Turkey

The increasing currency of the Anthropocene era demands new ways of thinking about grief and trauma which are both personal and cultural experiences. As E. Ann Kaplan proposes, the concept of “pre-traumatic stress syndrome” describes how cultural representations of accelerated environmental degradation generate “climate trauma,” which is accompanied by its own psychological condition (2015). Further, a host of slowly unfolding environmental crises confront us with “slow violence,” which is neither sudden nor spectacular but instead incremental with calamitous repercussions for years or decades or centuries. Much of the current narrative on the Anthropocentric age relies on the realm of Western and European from human-centered, techno-focused, and masculinist lens, overlooking the feminist roots of work on the Anthropocene. This novel project proposes feminist and queer study of Anthropocene trauma in post-imperial Turkey and its European diasporas by investigating how public intellectuals remember and dramatize grief and trauma regarding the lingering environmental effects of the Ottoman Empire, the environmental aftermath of war and genocide, climate trauma, and other forms of slow violence in modern Turkish literature. Divided into five work packages, the objectives of this project can be synthesized as follows: mobilizing a new taxonomy of trauma and grief in contemporary Turkey pertinent to the Anthropocene; developing feminist and queer forms of insight into the Anthropocene conversation through post-Ottoman context; being the first of its kind that simultaneously acknowledges and transcends current environmental concerns and one that relates back to gender, race, ethnicity, and class in Turkey and its European diasporas. This project corresponds well with 2020 EU policies regarding environment and climate action and the Horizon 2020 Work Programme since it studies a wide range of psychoanalytical and physical response to our dire environment predicament.