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The Club, a Turkish series exclusively produced for Netflix, challenges the official historical narrative of modern Turkey by depicting the experiences of minorities on the brink of the country’s political upheaval. It highlights the state’s complex relations with its minorities and historical events that are often silenced in the official historical narrative. This study looks at how Turkey’s dark pasts pertaining to its religious minorities are portrayed in The Club and the ways in which its audience respond to these dark pasts. It argues that the audience of The Club recreates the silences about the past, resulting in the denial or rationalization of state violence, while emphasizing a nostalgic multi-cultural past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January of 2015 Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosted the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the newly built extravagant and highly controversial presidential palace. Sixteen warriors representing all of the former Turkic empires in full costume were present at the welcoming ceremony. This paper uses Volkan's psycho‐political framework to understand state‐led efforts of historical revisionism which manifest itself in historical glories and nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire. The central argument posits that grandiose or mega projects strategically serve historical revisionism in Turkey, amplifying selected glories of Turkish society to bolster support for authentic and national narrative, known as "yerli ve milli (domestic and national)" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of government-controlled media in provoking the current wave of religious/nationalism in Turkey. We use Friedman's concept of the Soldier's Matrix and Volkan's large group identity as analytical lenses to explain how Turkey's society is propped up in a constant state of fear driven by an imagined existential threat and promised glory. We argue that the Erdoğan administration fuels polarization instrumentalizes the Sevres trauma and promised glory of the Ottoman Empire. In turn, these imagined fears and promises rationalize populist domestic and foreign policies. Through the example of entertainment television content drawn from Payitaht: Abdülhamid, this paper exemplifies how media facilitates the activation of Turkey's soldier's matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image and reputation are key factors in how nations are perceived by global audiences. Current and historical issues can pose as challenges to a nation's reputation prompting the need to save face. The Armenian genocide is one of the most critical issues the Republic of Turkey has had to manage in terms of its global image and reputation. While the vast body of literature on the subject borrows from history and political science focusing on the mechanism of denial, this paper offers a communication framework to understand the rhetoric of Turkey's image repair. Turkey's crisis communication strategies vis-à-vis the centennial of the Armenian genocide are analyzed by employing Benoit's image repair theory through a content analysis of official statements and declarations by the heads of state given in 2014 and 2015. In response to the emerging political crisis, the Turkish government primarily employed image repair strategies of evading responsibility and reducing offensiveness with the aim to appeal to international audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkish Jewish culture is largely unknown within Turkey due to various reasons, including demographic and historical factors. Negative stereotypes about Jews in Turkish film and television have further contributed to this lack of understanding. The ground-breaking television series, The Club, produced for Netflix, showcases Turkish Jews as its main characters and highlights their Sephardic heritage. We believe that media plays an important role in educating the public and shaping perceptions. To explore this, we conducted thirty in-depth, semi-structured interviews using the snowball method to investigate the impact of the series on the audience's knowledge of Turkish Jews. Our findings suggest that The Club has helped raise awareness about Turkish Jews, Sephardic culture, and Judaism among the research sample, as it presents a non-stereotypical portrayal of its Jewish characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]