The Aesthetics of Public Visibility: Alevi<i>Semah</i>and the Paradoxes of Pluralism in Turkey

Abstract

Efforts to theorize pluralism have often explored the challenges posed by the public visibility of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences to modernist imaginaries of a homogeneous national body. In this essay, I examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest. The situation reveals what I call a paradox of pluralism.