Dawn of the Street Child and the Boredom of the Flâneur: The Aporia of Aesthetic Experience in Walter Benjamin

Salih Akkanat

Abstract: This article is a study on Walter Benjamin’s aesthetic and political thought. He tries to position Benjamin’s aesthetic understanding in the context of today’s aesthetic debates. He bases aesthetics as a sensibility regime and proposes that a sensuous relationship can be established between politics and aesthetics. Rather than being an ideological tool that serves the illusion of autonomy and freedom, it focuses on the potential of aesthetics that forms the basis for the experience of freedom and re-establishes the social bond. In this respect, he emphasizes that Benjamin’s effort to draw conclusions for aesthetics from the sociology of modernity and the connections he established between the capture of meaning and the liberation of meaning that limit the form of relationship between aesthetics and politics. Therefore, the article focuses on the coherence and inconsistency between his political and epistemological engagements and his aesthetic thought, and discusses the extent to which he has an aesthetic thought in congruence with politics.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Politics, Emancipation, Modernity, Walter Benjamin

Salih Akkanat
DOI: 10.29224/insanveinsan.1057409
Year 9, Issue 32, Spring 2022


Tam metin / Full text
(Turkish)

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Aesthetic and Sociological Imagination in Contemporary Visual Culture

Uğur Yılmaz / Ece Nur Demir Yılmaz

Abstract: This study aims to examine the relationship between aesthetic and sociological imagination within the framework of the characteristics of visual forms (art/media images) in the environment of contemporary visual culture and to make a theoretical assessment of the importance of these imagery structures in art and art education. These assessments were carried out from a perspective based on the relationship between art and society. As a result of these assessments, it was found that the relationship between aesthetic and sociological imagination is intertwined within the scope of the production, distribution, and consumption processes of visual forms in the postmodern process, and in parallel with this situation, the importance of teaching activities and curriculum arrangements for the integration of both imagination structures in art education has been encountered. It has been understood that pedagogical activities focused on developing sociological imagination will provide a sociological perspective to the aesthetic imagination of individuals; thus, it will help to provide a conscious way of thinking about the cultural and social characteristics of visual forms.

Keywords: Sociological imagination, Aesthetic imagination, Sociology of art, Art education, Postmodern art

Uğur Yılmaz / Ece Nur Demir Yılmaz
DOI: 10.29224/insanveinsan.1056801
Year 9, Issue 32, Spring 2022


Tam metin / Full text
(English)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The Weltpolitik and “Other” Side of Friendship: The Ottoman Image in German Political Cartoons

Eren Deniz Özçin

Abstract: This work is about German political cartoons about the Ottoman Empire during the First World War (1914-1918). The aim of the study is to discuss Germany’s Orientalist perception about the Ottoman Empire through these cartoons. In this context, the basic assumption of the work is that Germany’s Orientalist attitude is related to Weltpolitik (World Politics), which was adopted during the Wilhelm II period (1918-1918) and had an imperialist character. In this period, Germany abandoned Otto von Bismarck’s balance policy centered on Europe and adopted Weltpolitik aimed at acquiring overseas colonies, and accordingly turned its attention especially to the Near East. Within the scope of Weltpolitik, Germany tried to influence the Ottoman Empire economically, militarily and politically in order to colonize the Near East geography on the basis of neo-colonialism. Therefore, the Ottoman Empire, as a part of the Orient, became the “other” to be dominated in the eyes of Germany. Thus, as can be seen in the cartoons, the Ottoman and Turkish images were identified with negative qualities for the Germans within the context of Orientalism.

Keywords: Germany, Ottoman Empire, Cartoons, Orientalism, Weltpolitik

Eren Deniz Özçin
DOI: 10.29224/insanveinsan.1057881
Year 9, Issue 32, Spring 2022


Tam metin / Full text
(Turkish)

359 Downloads


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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

War of Images: Visual Propaganda Efforts of German and British Governments in Turkey during the Second World War

Hatice Selen Akçalı Uzunhasan

Abstract: The Second World War was not only “the war of bombs and bullets” but also of images and words. Even though Turkey did not enter the war until February 1945, Allied and Axis forces tried to influence the Turkish government and society with propaganda and intelligence campaigns. They used radio, cinema, newsreels, propaganda magazines, posters, and pamphlets to persuade Turkish people. Cinema and magazines, in other terms, moving images and still images – photographs – constituted crucial tools of this propaganda. Trying to stay neutral in the war, the Turkish government fought with the “inappropriate” images through strict censorship. However, despite all the obstacles, both sides of the war found Turkish allies to cooperate in order to transmit their messages.

Keywords: Turkey in the Second World War, Visual propaganda, Film propaganda, Propaganda magazines, Media censorship

Hatice Selen Akçalı Uzunhasan
DOI: 10.29224/insanveinsan.1058193
Year 9, Issue 32, Spring 2022


Tam metin / Full text
(English)

364 Downloads


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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Critical Approaches on Kuyucaklı Yusuf in the Context of Relationship Between Literature, Period and Politics

Betül Mutlu

Abstract: According to reception aesthetic which is one of the reader-centered theories, literary works continue to create meaning in the eye of the readers within the frame of new contexts changing at the following periods as well as being the product of historical and social context at their period. As for Hans Robert Jauss, the meaning of a work is received in various ways in time, in other words, through the historical period within the context of work and reader interaction. While the social, cultural, and ideological circumstances of historical period of the readers are changing, some changes in the reception of a literary work also come up. In this article, critical reviews that were written on Kuyucaklı Yusuf (1937) at different periods were analyzed within the frame of literary, historical and political qualities of their periods based on Jaus’s ideas. After that, it was aimed to identify the perceptions which changed and evolved about the novel in time. The novel was criticized in a positive light as it talked about real life in Anatolia in those years and it had powerful observation skills, and in a negative way as it idealized the characters. After 60s, it is seen that socialist realistic side of the novel was brought up as well as realism-romantism association/incoherence in the novel.

Keywords: Sabahattin Ali, Kuyucaklı Yusuf, Critic, Text-readerinteraction, Perception aesthetic

Betül Mutlu
DOI: 10.29224/insanveinsan.1055042
Year 9, Issue 32, Spring 2022


Tam metin / Full text
(Turkish)

366 Downloads


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Modern Political Cinema as an Active Minor Cinema: “On Fertile Lands”

Derya Çetin / İkbal Bozkurt Avcı

Abstract: Gilles Deleuze questioned the possibility of a minor cinema and grounded modern political cinema with little change on the defining features of minor literature. Modern political cinema expresses the filmmaking style of peoples who are colonized, dominated and positioned as minorities in third world countries that are in crisis of collective identity. In Turkish cinema, too, Erden Kıral is shown among the directors of third world cinema in terms of the social problems he deals with in his films and the way he describes them. In line with this idea, Erden Kıral’s film “On Fertile Lands”, which is an adaptation of Orhan Kemal in 1980, was evaluated in the context of the basic elements of the minor cinema developed by Deleuze. The film was chosen as a sample because of the deep feeling of political, economic and cultural turmoil and segregation in Turkey at the time it was shot. In the study, it was concluded that the film can be evaluated within the scope of modern political cinema.

Keywords: Cinema, Modern political cinema, Minor-becoming, On Fertile Lands

Derya Çetin / İkbal Bozkurt Avcı
DOI: 10.29224/insanveinsan.1058263
Year 9, Issue 32, Spring 2022


Tam metin / Full text
(Turkish)

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A Trip to the Moon to World War Z: A Hundred Years of Construction of the Savage in Science Fiction Movies

Yusuf Ziya Gökçek

Abstract: Science fiction cinema reproduces the self-centered recognition of the other and hierarchically coding the entities created in modern sci-fi novels originating from the 17th century. It makes the existence outside itself strange and freaky, but it prefers to leave its human essence in a tamable form. Colonialism transforms the space and human being affected by the disaster, which it tries to find, to a controllable level and a hegemonic power generation. In the study, it will be seen how a legacy has been transferred by appropriating the conventions of the science fiction tradition before itself, and how the genre has evolved from the past to the present will be examined with Van Dijk’s discourse analysis. It has been observed that Le Voyage dans la lune (Georges Méliès, 1902) and World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013) chosen as samples, which have more than a century among them, constantly produce the wild/ savage. The most fundamental rhetoric of Science Fiction and colonial politics is to clarify the distinction between us and the other, to establish a hierarchical sequence within the genre on the basis of the principles of dependency and liberation.

Keywords: Colonialism, Savage / Wild, Sci-Fi Film, World War Z, A Trip to the Moon

Yusuf Ziya Gökçek
DOI: 10.29224/insanveinsan.1058106
Year 9, Issue 32, Spring 2022


Tam metin / Full text
(Turkish)

336 Downloads


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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.