Notes on the cultural representations of the poor-subaltern in Turkey

Designed to formulate the problematic of a research project about the political and cultural representations of the urban poor in Turkey, this working paper calls for listening to the “small voices of history” as well as for criticising the fobic, romantic-populist, technicist and ampiricist fantasms of the discourses about the poor. What is needed is to trace the ways in which the poor-subaltern receive or signify the social processes of exclusion and marginalisation. Mapping cultural representations of the poor-subaltern would indicate that they cannot be totally incorporated by the “dominant ideology”. The poor-subaltern are neither agents of hidden resistance ever ready to get activated and mobilised nor pure victims of ideological manipulation or absorption. The practices of everyday life and “affective economies” of the poor-subaltern suggest that they rather make do with the power edifice in numerous subtle ways. Even if they speak a language borrowed from political, religious or televisual discourses, the latter still remains foreign to their tongue, and is haunted by the spectre of “another justice.