Theatre and Solidarity among the Transnational Alevi Community

Abstract

The Alevi religious minority makes up the largest religious minority in Turkey, and their history of persecution dates back before the Republic of Turkey. The inception of the Republic of Turkey as a secular nation-state in 1923 was initially promising for the Alevis, but the regime remained implicitly Sunni Muslim. So, the community’s experiences of citizenship and belonging continued to be characterized by precarity as they occupied a category of national abjection.

Beginning in the 1960s, the waves of migration from rural areas to urban Turkey and Western Europe gradually transformed the experiences of the Alevi community and they became more visible. With migration, Alevi people’s everyday experiences of oppression and discrimination as well as their need for community-building and solidarity intensified. In Europe, the Alevi diaspora was too often categorized simply as Turkish or Muslim immigrants. Many of them wanted to differentiate themselves from the Sunni Muslim Turkish majority in the diaspora and gain recognition as a distinct group. They organized in their new homelands and established formal and informal networks of transnational solidarity. In the formation and sustenance of these networks and solidarity, theatre has played a crucial role.

The plays staged by Alevi community theatres and professional groups in Turkey and its diasporas have focused primarily on the histories of violence and persecution against Alevis. As such, theatre functions as a site for the constitution of public memory and the intergenerational transfer and transformation of trauma and serves the affective politics of community-building and solidarity among the transnational Alevi community. The political economy of these performances is a crucial element of the politics of solidarity, contributing to the sustenance of Alevi cultural producers and their communities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC-2019-STG, STAGING NATIONAL ABJECTION, Grant agreement ID: 852216). I would like to thank the European Research Council for their generous support. I have written this article in Dr. Rüstem Ertug Altinay's Archives and Performance Seminar at Kadir Has University.

Correction Statement

This ar ticle has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In July 1993, thirty-seven people lost their lives due to radical Sunni Islamists setting fire to the hotel where those who came to the city of Sivas for an Alevi cultural event were staying.

2 In the province of Tunceli, formerly Dersim, Turkey, from March 1937 to September 1938, a military campaign took place against those who had objections to the 1934 Resettlement Law. The law aimed at the assimilation of non-Turkish minorities through forced and collective resettlement. The area was populated by Kurdish and Zaza Alevis and many civilians were killed in the operations.

3 In December 1978, for more than a week, extreme rightist and fascist groups first systematically marked the front doors of Alevis and left-wing civilians with red crosses, then dragged them out of their houses and shops, tortured and murdered them. According to official records, more than 100 Alevis living in Kahramanmaraş were killed in these events. The state did not intervene for days, and no one has yet been prosecuted for this event.