ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Turkish official practices of copying and re-enactment of the Ottoman past in the civic sphere, and illustrates the ways in which governmentality is enmeshed in mimetic and memorial practices. Neo-Ottomanism represents a break with the previously dominant memory culture of Ataturkism, in which secular ideals for the organisations of state and society prevailed at the cost of Islamist identity and were bolstered by a phenomenally ubiquitous public imagery celebrating and disseminating Ataturk’s cult of personality. In his history of panoramas, Bernard Comment notes that they have tended to represent cityscapes or battles, providing an inhabitable model of an external reality and a privileged viewpoint. Within the memory cult of Neo-Ottomanism there is a tension between imitation and re-becoming, as though one should not ‘imitate’ or ‘copy’ but rather be again what one ‘once was’, reverting, as it were, to one’s proper state, to a notional ‘true’ path or self.
