Social Trauma and Telecinematic Memory

Pelin Başcı is Associate Professor of Turkish Language and Literature at Portland State University, USA, where she teaches courses on popular culture, cinema, and literature of Turkey. A recipient of various awards including a Fulbright scholarship for doctoral work, Başcı received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, with additional doctoral coursework at Ankara University, Turkey. She is author of numerous cultural studies articles and reviews on women and gender in Turkey, the late-Ottoman popular press and advertising for women, the canon of Turkish literature, and coup films as counter-narratives. Her research and teaching interests cover modern Turkish literature and popular culture, Turkish cinema, and women and gender in Turkey.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Framing the 1980 Coup Films as a Cultural and Cinematographic Discourse.- Chapter 3: The Search for a Pre-Traumatized Childhood.- Chapter 4: Films of Trauma Unfolding: Confinement.- Chapter 5: Films of Trauma Unfolding: Disorientation and Loss.- Chapter 6: Locating Innocence: The Embroidered Rose on My Scarf.- Chapter 7: Television Searches Deeper and Farther: Remember, My Darling.- Chapter 8: The Impossibility of Forgetting: WouldThis Heart Forget You?.- Chapter 9: Conclusion.

"The book tries to establish how telecinematic remembrance is culturally significant as a public performance of memory. That is why it identifies not as a work on cinema, but as a project that finds its roots in cultural studies. ... Acknowledging that the whole country is going through another wave of authoritarianism, Basci ends on an explicitly hopeful note, stating that coups films also have a way of showing how top-down policies are doomed to fail." (Can Koçak, Studies in European Cinema, May 19, 2022)

“The book tries to establish how telecinematic remembrance is culturally significant as a public performance of memory. That is why it identifies not as a work on cinema, but as a project that finds its roots in cultural studies. … Acknowledging that the whole country is going through another wave of authoritarianism, Başcı ends on an explicitly hopeful note, stating that coups films also have a way of showing how top-down policies are doomed to fail.” (Can Koçak, Studies in European Cinema, May 19, 2022)