ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter provides an overall discussion of the themes that emerge throughout, together with extended arguments about affective practice in the museums, their intertextuality, and contemporary governmental uses of the past. The museums are part of a memory war in which antagonistic groups refer to different histories in order to constitute self and other, perpetuating a tense polity. Notwithstanding such antagonism, there are considerable commonalities between museums and memory cultures, and they can usefully be understood as intertextual and multidirectional. Although this takes place relatively explicitly in Turkey, I argue that comparable memory practice occurs elsewhere, drawing on European examples that resonate with the museums presented in this book, problematizing any view of Turkey as an irrational or emotional other.
