"The Panorama of Conquest": A Cultural Approach to National Emotions

This article examines the Panorama Museum of Conquest in Istanbul, a triumphalist example of state-led nostalgia, to understand how a national emotional attachment is sustained or contested through new forms of engagement with history. Using the dual-process model of cognition, particularly the differentiation between declarative and nondeclarative personal and public cultures, I take the museum as a manifestation of neo-Ottomanist public culture where national identities are performed, to delve into the process of emotional meaning making. I complicate the link between affective experience at the museum and national emotions, and theorize the different coupling possibilities among the two. When the personal and public culture seamlessly match, with people following the highly schematized cues, visitors understand their emotions as pride and gratitude. When the personal and public culture are loosely coupled, a group of visitors lament the bygone glorious era-which does not reflect the felt state at the museum. Some visitors are able to synthesize different political projects during their visit, where others want to sanitize public discourse from neo-Ottomanist emotions altogether. The dual-process model helps answer why in the same national-sensory setting, people emote differently, whereby complicating our understanding of national-attachment to the state.