Porous Whiteness

This article challenges the prevailing view that race played no role in Ottoman history. It shows how Turkish-speaking intellectuals used the race episteme to position themselves within the higher ranks of Eurocentric global hierarchies, as well as to formulate a new secular Turkish identity. These two entangled race projects were both challenges to the Islamic nationalism of the authoritarian Hamidian regime and the effects of a deeper colonial paradigm shift: a new ontological and epistemological centering of the Western European body as the universal standard of human evolution. While highlighting the inchoateness, circularity, and social constructedness of race, this article shows how a group of Ottoman literati formulated—in line with this new Eurocentric paradigm—a new racial-civilizational identity for Turkish speakers through biologized concepts of sensitivity and aesthetics. On one hand, they diagnosed themselves with the same pathological nervousness (neurasthenia) as contemporary Western elites, elevating this sensitivity to a shared marker of racial evolution. On the other hand, they used literary criticism to defend their Europe-inspired literature as a natural product of Turkish racial evolution. They not only justified Europeanization as a law of evolution but also created notions of Turkishness detached from any Arabo-Persian heritage and, more importantly, from Islam. This article foregrounds the significance of literary aesthetics and sensitivity for racialization projects, thus expanding the scope of race studies. Moreover, it suggests studying turn-of-the-century racial thought less as a set of fixed constructs and more as a malleable yet Eurocentric epistemology and identity field shaped by the interplay of structures of global asymmetry and local agency.