Fight Scenes:Pop Culture as Asymmetric Battleground in Autocratizing Turkey

This book talk examines how sites of pop culture production, regulation, and dissemination serve as an asymmetric battleground on which authoritarian regimes and various opposition actors wage highly contested and politically significant struggles. Unpacking the importance that Turkey’s AKP placed on achieving cultural as well as political hegemony, Hintz examines factors including institutional capture, crony capitalism, streaming platform regulations, and cultivated self-censorship that tip the cultural playing field heavily in the ruling party’s favor, yet still leave space for creative resistance. In spotlighting fight scenes in – and, importantly, over – popular media products such as TV shows, films, and music, as well as the artists and production teams who create them, the book provides an in-depth empirical study of the politics of pop culture in contemporary Turkey. Hintz’s book also offers broader comparative insight into the powerful role debates over the “appropriateness” of cultural phenomena in regime definitions of the “nation” play in processes of autocratization and opposition mobilization, and implores political scientists to expand their conceptual and methodological toolkits in their study of these phenomena.

Host or Publisher Office of Faculty Affairs