Following the coup attempt of 15th of July 2016, Turkey’s AKP government started targeting academics, journalists, politicians, actors, directors, i.e. the intellectuals who produce oppositional art and critical knowledge, criminalizing them as enemies of the state. This new climate has started to limit the opportunities of production and reproduction for the intellectuals and artists, and even holding a dissident stance became a source of risk on its own. The Republic of Turkey limited, oppressed and punished the means of expression by giving one of the harshest (and maybe the most violent) reactions of its history against critical thought and opposition. The culture of democracy, which was almost already non-existent, has been completely abolished through the suspension of democracy on the ostensible level. This ongoing period is a one, in which producers of critical knowledge and opposing artists are being faced with immense oppression and penal sanctions. One of the outcomes of this process is a kind of new-nomadism that we can sketch out as “leaving behind”. And one of the forms of this leaving is (voluntary or involuntary) exile. The majority of those whom we call “exiled intellectuals” today, have migrated generally to Western Europe, Great Britain, the United States and especially to Germany. Since this new wave of migration, which had started after the Gezi uprisings and gained momentum following the coup attempt, has some distinct fundamental features compared to the previous waves; in order to provide a framework, it is defined as “new-exile''. The fundamental property of this experience is the simultaneous mobilization of intellectual capital and (bipolar) opposition. The form of the opposition in question has the ability to take root at the lands it arrives at. It does not point towards a single direction (forward or backwards) and a single place (the place it was ruptured); it is here/now and multidirectional. This state of new exilewitnesses the efforts of existing producers of critical information and arts in the “heim” they migrated to, due to the fact that the producers of critical information and arts have been against the fascism in Turkey as well as being opponents of the dominant world system. As political subjects of the resistance against authoritarianism, they are continuously and collectively fighting against the structural fate of displacement.
As both subjects and researchers of this current state of exile, it is our primary responsibility to understand and produce knowledge of these intellectuals’ responses in this new life, to monitor the creation processes of the new mechanisms to cope with the challenges, and to understand/investigate the effects of all these on the transnational social space. We attempt to determine the content of this book as based on our own experiences as exiled intellectuals. We believe that in this period of exile we are subjects and witnesses of ahistoric period due to our individual struggle for existence as well as our organizing and our modes of solidarity as a group of exiled intellectuals. We know that we transform ourselves and in the meanwhile, we pave the way for mutual interaction and transformation of the structures within which we built relationships.
This is why our motivation behind the idea of compiling this book was not only academic concerns of analyzing the process and contributing to the literature of exile, but also take down a record of our own stories, creating memories of our exilic lives and our existence/solidarity strategies and our experiences in activism and sharing them with intellectuals around the globe who share the same fate. We believe that this book with academic analyses and personal stories of intellectuals from different professions will also act as a guide for the steps towards transnational collaborations.