This study analyzes transformations of historiography and identity discourses by focusing on the Memory House of Ali Rıza Efendi (the father of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) as a “site of historical consciousness” which was reconstructed in the western part of the Republic of Macedonia. The House, referred to by the villagers as the “Memory House of Atatürk,” was opened in 2014 in a Muslim village, Kocacık, with the support of the Turkish state. Through material and textual representations of Atatürk's life, the House speaks to the Turkishness and Turkish presence in the Balkans. The Turkishness, however, is imagined through the neo-Ottoman and Islamic prisms. The House thus becomes the locus of alternative interpretations of the past, and, consequently, narratives of Muslims’ identity and origin in the region. Moreover, as it is reconstructed at the nexus of the local and the transnational, the House is also called a symbol of the “politics of brotherhood” between Macedonia and Turkey. In this way, the institution embodies the reconstruction of the past not only at the local and national levels, but also at the international level.

This paper scrutinizes anxieties of national identity in Turkey through the image of Zeki Müren in three films, Beklenen Şarkı, Kırık Plak, and Son Beste. In these films the image of Zeki Müren is articulated as the ridiculous sublime. His image always tells two stories simultaneously: construction and collapse of national identity. Through an analysis of Müren's early films, the paper shows, how anxieties about the formation of Turkish citizenship and about modernity are substantiated in his image. This analysis is carried out in the following steps: I, first, explain how the films chosen here construct the feeling of we-ness and national imaginary by virtue of Classical Turkish music and the voice of Zeki Müren. I show that the image of Zeki Müren in these films tells the story of the national subject being interpellated or hailed by Turkishness and argue that Zeki Müren's image exposes the “speculary” structure of Turkishness. Examining the construction, completeness, and integrity of Turkish national identity the paper continues to explore its collapse, incompleteness, and disintegration–that is, the dimension of “beyond interpellation.” Put differently, I analyze how the feeling of we-ness collapses and explore the pleasure and torment produced through the relationship between social power and the subject. With the help of these two axes of exploration, I show how the torment as well as the pleasure of subjection, the desire to be recognized as well as the fear of not being recognized is the text of Zeki Müren's image in these films.