F. Michael Wuthrich. National Elections in Turkey: People, Politics, and the Party System. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015. xv + 270 pages, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth US$49.95 ISBN 978-0-8156-3412-6 (original) (raw)

Review of Middle East Studies, 2017

Abstract

even adequately examine the category of the aesthetic as promised in the introduction (1). Several of the chapters would have benefited from a more concentrated visual, textual, or aural analysis of the aesthetic forms that emerged from these protests, although this criticism does not detract from their smart interpretations of the social processes occurring around and through these forms. The volume is gorgeously augmented with over 150 color illustrations of protests, graffiti, signs, and cartoons. It serves as one of the most comprehensive scholarly gatherings of visual documentation of the uprisings I have seen. It also includes a very helpful timeline of the protests in different locations from 2010 to 2013, allowing the reader to discover potential influences and transnational circulations between different movements. The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest, especially the introduction and its strongest chapters, would be very useful to teach in both undergraduate and graduate courses on the Middle East uprisings, political protest, visual culture, and sound cultures. Overall, the volume should encourage more scholarship on the aesthetics of protest, because, as the authors say, these are not the “trivial ‘decoration’ of serious politics, the ‘icing on the cake’, so to speak.” As they rightfully argue, there is a “critical need . . . to recognize a radical shift inmodes ofmobilization and political activism that the uprisings and protests signaled, one not fully incorporated into the scholarly literature; a new embodied and aesthetic way of doing politics worldwide” (13). This is a potentially field-defining volume, pertinent to ongoing political protests everywhere.

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