Description
This paper explores the entanglement of populism and ontological security in contemporary Turkey through the aesthetic and affective dimensions of political performance. Building on recent understandings of populism as an embodied and symbolically mediated performance, the study examines how Turkish populism mobilizes religious symbols, visual tropes, and cultural imaginaries to stabilize its sense of self amid embedded ontological anxieties. Through nationalist-religious visual motifs, character archetypes, uniforms, rituals and soundtracks as aesthetic carriers of populism in government-supported historical TV series, Turkish populism constructs an emotional narrative of loss and restoration while traveling toward a future of an imagined past. In this sense, the populist project rearticulates the boundaries of belonging, justifying the regime’s legitimacy while projecting the image of a neoliberal-conservative nation-state in which populism constitutes the ideological form of an institutionalized regime and the vision of a glorious “New Turkey.” By analyzing the performative aesthetics of populist discourse and media culture, this paper argues that populism in Turkey functions as a mechanism for seeking ontological security to heal the perceived dislocation between the nation’s self-image and its place in a rapidly evolving global order. The Turkish case illustrates how populist politics deploy affect, performance, and visual culture to negotiate the existential insecurities of modern statehood.
