"Is the Turk a White Man?": Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity (Studies in Critical Social Sciences)

In 1909, US courts set out to decide “whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalized as a white person.” Turkish elites had already undertaken to portray the Turks as the historic source of Western civilization, white racial stock, and human language. Examining this interaction between global racial discourses and local responses, Ergin recentres Turkish modernization on imaginings of race.

Murat Ergin, Ph.D. (2005), University of Minnesota, is Associate Professor of Sociology at Koç University. His research interests include nationalism, race, ethnicity, cultural boundaries, and death.