Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East

Becoming Turkish deepens our understanding of the modernist nation-building processes in post—Ottoman Turkey through a rare perspective that stresses social and cultural dimensions and everyday negotiations of the Kemalist reforms. Yilmaz asks how the reforms were mediated on the ground and how ordinary citizens received, reacted to, and experienced them. She traces the experiences of the subaltern as well as the experiences of the elites and the mediators in the overall narrative—highlighting the relevance of class, gender, location, and urban and rural differences while also revealing the importance of nonideological, social, and psychological factors such as childhood and generations.