Figures That Speak

It has become something of a commonplace, whether in the professional press, everyday conversation, or serious scholarship, to concede, most often with a tacit sigh, that nationalism is on the rise today. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 (and again in 2024) is no doubt the most obvious and significant symptom of this trend for American critics, but similarly aligned politicians litter the global landscape. Leaders, both ideologically diverse and philosophically aligned, have been grouped together under the aegis of a general ascendant nationalism, regardless of the country they represent. While these figures are popularly associated with a right-wing platform, nationalism is by no means a solely conservative phenomenon. In France, for instance, both Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon have been justifiably described as nationalists, with the conservative former advocating for familiar anti-immigrant, ethnocentric policies and the progressive latter championing greater state control over economic and social policy against EU interdependence and austerity. Accordingly, while such political movements are typically cast in the singular by journalists and commentators, scholars of nationalism are often wont to point out that, like the flags they wave, nationalists come in all stripes and colors and, hence, that it would be better, if somewhat awkward, to say that nationalisms are on the rise. Even such an emendation fails to reach the root of the error, however, as claims that nationalisms are now resurgent too often rest on the mistaken premise that they were ever dormant rather than always operating beneath the surface of civic discourse. Yet, as Matthew deTar demonstrates in his impressive recent monograph on the subject, Figures That Speak: The Vocabulary of Turkish Nationalism, as both a political project and a rhetorical discourse nationalism has, in fact, been a constant, too essential to our ideological fabric ever to fade away, its shape merely changing with the times.At the core of Figures That Speak lies an ambitious effort to reimagine the rhetorical mechanics by which national identity is constituted not as a static state ideology or unified teleological tradition but as an embedded yet fluid constellation of representational (rather than formally linguistic) “figures” within discourse that both reflect and reproduce authority. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of discourse as a protean network of relations to power and knowledge that appears materially in public speech and institutional forms, deTar asks what, precisely, is “the purpose, content, or effect of a nationalist imaginary, of a discursive form” (3), and he answers with a capacious theory that places rhetorical practice at the center of the habitual circulation and constitution of nationalism. According to deTar, the discourse of nationalism is animated by certain contingent concepts, regular and recognizable “nodes of knowledge, law, history, and practice, which constitute relations of authority and produce general understanding of the content of national identity” (16). Common political subjects, such as a country’s founding father, its relationship to international neighbors, or its internal demographic makeup, do not merely populate nationalist discourse; such prototypical figures drive it, organizing the intelligibility of political life. National identity, in turn, emerges not as a coherent expression of an ideological project but as a discursive effect of how these objects of debate circulate: each act in and on speech projecting authority precisely by naturalizing its own presence in the rhetorical field through repetition. Therefore, deTar reframes nationalism not as a project articulated through stable social content but as a discourse sustained by the shifting arrangement and reiteration of a figural vocabulary—a dispersed ensemble of references whose repetition both reproduces and reauthorizes the imagined coherence of the nation.Notably, the sweeping notion of figure in this account signifies something relatively far afield from how rhetoricians classically have understood the term, as the book readily acknowledges in its introductory chapter. DeTar, rather, attempts to expand the word’s meaning beyond purely “abstract, universal linguistic strategies” (7) like metaphor or catachresis so that it also includes the ideational or representational content disseminated in a discourse, like a proper name (Atatürk, Europe) or a popular concept (religion, the military, the minority). In this greatly broadened sense, figures function as “more than simply descriptors of institutions, phenomena, or issues to debate in public,” instead operating “as shorthand for complex networks and histories of authority” (4) that actively shape the public contexts in which they emerge. From a more traditionally rhetorical perspective, deTar’s figures, which, he says, “become the sites of invention of new understandings of authority” (4), seem ultimately more akin to conventional topoi—or even what might be considered a meme of particular social import—than to formal tropes or schemes. While this effort to enlarge the compass of figuration feels ultimately unnecessary and, thus, falls flat, at least for this reader, the remainder of the project, mutatis mutandis, remains compelling, providing a way for understanding how national identity internally imagines itself.By attending to five significant recurring figures in Turkish public discourse—Atatürk, religion, the military, the minority, and Europe, with each topic receiving its own chapter—Figures That Speak contends that one can track not just what is spoken about within nationalist discourse but how those topics function in conversation to produce the nation coterminously. The point, says deTar, is that “nationalism is an interaction between figures” (156), figures that have shifted, expanded, and transformed immensely over the decades even as “the vocabulary for sorting and performing these changes remains constant” (186). After an initial section outlining the theoretical foundations of his project, chapter 1 analyzes Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s celebrated Nutuk (The speech), an oration delivered over six days in 1927 that has become one of the founding texts of Turkish national identity. The speech itself is an expansive work of byzantine origin, a dutiful archive of telegrams, letters, and field reports that predate the Republic and often originate from voices other than Atatürk’s, who nonetheless “exerts an interpretative hegemony over the content of these historical documents” (47). By looking backward to locate foundational moments of national formation in these outside sources, Atatürk is able to treat the emergence of Turkey as a fait accompli while simultaneously obfuscating his own role in its constitution, with Nutuk functioning “as a founding document of the nation that disavows its role as founding document,” one that “both newly constitutes the nation and rhetorically obscures its role in that constitution” (37).Aside from Atatürk himself, the other significant nationalist topics taken up in the speech are the figures of religion and the military, which deTar tackles in the next two chapters. The extended discussion of religion in chapter 2 offers the book’s sharpest illustration of the thesis and methodology animating Figures That Speak, tracking how the ezan (the Muslim call to prayer) serves as a barometer for the shifting function and effect of religion in the early decades of the Turkish Republic. DeTar juxtaposes two legislative moments to show this evolution. Whereas in 1932 the government mandated that all mosques recite the ezan in Turkish rather than Arabic to achieve a better break with past precisian fanaticism and safeguard the secular spirit of the recent democratic revolution, in 1950 the controversial ban was reversed for many of the same reasons, with the earlier law framed as an outmoded overreach detrimental to individual freedom of conscience. Between these two legislative actions, deTar describes how the category of religion “organizes knowledge and authorizes action” (89) in distinct ways for distinct contexts, identifying a “shift from a discursive style anchored by a revolutionary/reformist mandate to a discursive style that emphasizes the proper administration of the minutiae of everyday life” (67). DeTar’s treatment of religion thus demonstrates most vividly how a figure’s reiteration—its perpetual recalibration of foundational principles against present contingencies—orchestrates the nation’s self-understanding.The subsequent three chapters all adopt a similar pattern, following how seemingly essential topics—the role of the military in securing the state, the status of minorities apropos national identity, the state’s relationship to its geopolitical neighbors—are figured differently as the political context changes over time. Chapter 3, the most challenging section for readers less versed in the partisan divisions of Turkish history, examines how a series of military coups (in 1960, 1971, and 1980) provided occasion for rhetorically renegotiating the relationships between the state and the armed forces. DeTar traces how the military positioned itself, rather than the civilian government, as the custodian of the nation’s founding Kemalist ideals and how “[c]ontestation over the concept of the state made visible the influence of the figure of the military” (116) in Turkish nationalism. Next, chapter 4 focuses on the figure of the minority in debates about citizenship, analyzing a series of high-profile legal cases in the period 2000–2010 centered on the illegality of publicly denigrating Turkishness and, hence, leading naturally to questions of what or who counts as Turkish. DeTar argues that the minority operated in these trials as a “strategically malleable and unpredictably fluctuating figure in discourse” (121), shifting among ethnic identity, legal status, geopolitical legacy, and cultural modernity narrative, functioning less to describe those at the margins than to reinforce the rhetorical boundaries of the center and, thus, serving as a mechanism for securing the hegemony of nationalist discourse. Finally, before concluding with a brief epilogue, chapter 5 turns to Europe, analyzing how Turkish political discourse in both the 1963 Ankara Agreement and the 2005 EU accession talks mobilized a conception of Europe that positioned Turkey in a state of perpetual transition. DeTar contends that “Europe” functions rhetorically as “the locus of a judgment about Turkey” (166), a figure whose circulation enshrines Turkish liminality—always in-between, never quite modern, civilized, or Western enough—as a nigh-permanent condition for construing national identity.On the whole, Figures That Speak offers a welcome and original contribution to contemporary studies at the intersection of nationalism and rhetorical theory, with DeTar’s insistence on treating nationalism not merely as a historical ideology but as an evolving rhetorical field animated by recurring figures providing a productive supplement to more static or content-based accounts of national identity formation. While the project is largely historical in scope, focused on moments progressing from the early Republic through the early years of the twenty-first century, the present political climate, whether within Turkey or beyond, renders the book unmistakably timely—though one does wish, in the end, for more sustained engagement with the recent emphasis on authoritarian populism under President Erdoğan, whose use of nationalist tropes would seem a natural and revealing test case for the author’s central claims. On this side of the Atlantic, Robert C. Rowland’s The Rhetoric of Donald Trump (2021) offers a parallel account of how nationalist discourse functions as a key mechanism through which authoritarian populists like the two presidents accrue and consolidate political power. While nationalisms may not currently be on the rise per se, they nonetheless are of renewed relevance to international political discourse, and, thus, bringing deTar’s work into dialogue with these recent studies would help clarify how such a turn occurred and what it might mean for the future of democratic states. Likewise, while the book is consistently thoughtful and often incisive, its rhetorical terminology can at times feel unduly abstract or overextended, particularly the conflation of topoi with classical figures, and readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of Turkish political history may find certain sections formidable. Though the text may prove too specialized for use in most classrooms, for scholars interested in how nationalist discourse authorizes and reiterates its own authority across shifting political terrain deTar’s volume provides a robust and generative model, one likely to spur further inquiry across a variety of national contexts, pushing away from a one-size-fits-all approach to those better attuned to understanding nationalisms within their historical specificity

Ethos · Foreign policy · Ideology · Modernity · Nationalism · Politics · Presidency · Turkish · Cyprus History, Politics, Society · Media Discourse and Social Analysis · Turkey's Politics and Society