Description
“Arabesk,” a music genre that blends Turkish folk music with Arabic influences, has periodically dominated public discussion in Turkey since its emergence in the 1960s. The genre has always implied a relationship to the ruling elite: once heavily disdained by the bureaucratic center, it was later co-opted for populist ambitions. A robust academic discourse on arabesk is found in the influential work of Martin Stokes (1992), which accounts for the genre as a marginalized or counter-hegemonic one, as presented in the condescending stance of Turkey’s secularist bureaucratic elite towards arabesk. The relationship between arabesk and the political regime, however, had already started to change in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, as the genre became increasingly associated with the new conservatism in the power bloc (Özbek, 1991). With the construction of an Islamist hegemony following Erdoğan’s ascent to power in 2002, arabesk was further embraced by the political regime. During his 23 years in power, president Erdoğan pursued a concerted project of “articulating” (Hall, 1986; Laclau, 1977; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) arabesk to the new Islamist-liberal hegemony via particular populist and affective strategies. These include Erdoğan’s repeated performances of arabesk songs in election rallies, his deliberate integration of the love language of arabesk into political speeches, and his overt embrace of and collaboration with arabesk musicians. This paper traces the changing meanings of arabesk since its appearance as a potentially oppositional subculture in the 1960s, to its increasingly conservative political affiliations in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally to its more complete integration to right-wing ideologies by Erdoğan and the AKP government(s) in the 2000s. Drawing on media archives from the AKP era, the paper offers a reassessment of the history of arabesk, one that accounts for the genre’s association with hard-right populism today.
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