ABSTRACT

This chapter analyzes productions of Dersim as an outsider and centralizes outsiderness in studies of the nation and the state. First, it provides an analysis of how a newly founded Turkish state produced Dersim as an outsider population and place in the 1930s. Second, the chapter illustrates that the construction and management of outsiders through different means and strategies determined at the historically contingent intersections of local, national, and transnational relations are key to an understanding of national identity. Finally, it examines how the modern Turkish state managed outsiderness different from the Ottoman Empire and how managing of Dersim enabled the consolidation of the state in Turkey. Whereas Dersim's complex identity reveals the formation of a national identity through boundaries, the problems it poses reveal how the nation and state become connected by the problematization and managing of Dersim as an anomaly. The chapter concludes with the centrality of outsiderness for the construction of modern state power.