Writing non-Turkish Subjectivities, Writing Contradictions: Twentieth-Century Istanbul in İstanbul Ansiklopedisi

Abstract

İstanbul Ansiklopedisi is an absorbing project undertaken by the renowned historian Reşad Ekrem Koçu and published between 1944 and 1973. The encyclopaedia features a diverse range of entries about the history of buildings, fountains, customs, and individu-als who either lived in or visited the city. It provides a unique per-spective on Istanbul, containing information that was difficult to find elsewhere. The encyclopaedia has often been read and analysed for its entries on Ottoman history. Instead, this article concerns itself with the more recent history of this text, scrutinising the entries about twentieth-century Istanbul, entries that frequently included contradictions, especially concern-ing gender and sexuality. I explore the way in which Koçu referred to non-Turkish subjectivities that did not conform to the heteronorma-tive subject formation and went beyond the regulatory state dis-courses of the Turkish nation-state in the twentieth century.