Faces of the city: Poetic, mediagenic and traumatic images of a multi-cultural city in Southeast Turkey

This paper deals with antagonistic conceptualisations of a city, its urban space and its rural hinterland and the underlying political positions. It inquires into the struggle over the symbols, meanings and images, and ultimately over the right to possess a multi-ethnic and multi-religious city in the context of an eroding project of exclusionist nation-building after the containment of an ethnic conflict. The central argument of the paper is that the mitigation of conflict provides a new space in which different subject positions and political movements can be re-articulated, in order to create new hegemonic configurations of power that might open up trajectories for negotiation, which can potentially subvert relations of domination and subordination. The paper discusses the case of Mardin, a city at the Turco-Syrian border, with a conceptual framework based on the notions of imperial heritage, ethnocracy and hegemony, which are mobilised to reconstruct and discuss three relevant positions. With this framework, a perspective is developed, which sees urban space as a site in which hegemonic struggles over meaning and processes of discursive and material appropriation crystallise.