Tarkan and Identity Formation
Tarkan PLUS International continues familiarizing you with academic articles in which Tarkan’s name has been referred to. In the first part of our series we looked at Tarkan through the lenses of feminism and in the second part we reported about an article examining identity politics of diasporic communities and the transnational media.
This third part of our series aims to tell you about another academic article, Katharina Ernest and Heinz Moser’s “Media and Processes of Identity Formation in the Context of Migration” printed in “Medien Padagogik” in June 2005. Ernest and Moser’s media research conducted in Switzerland looks at the relationship between the following: the cultural background of migrant parents’ children, their use of the media and the media’s role in their identity formation.
In the article Tarkan’s name appears in a section where the respondents were interviewed about their musical habits. The data indicates that Turkish music is something that helps them establish “emotional ties” with their homeland because the musical styles of singers such as Tarkan, Mustafa Sandal and Ebru Gündeş combine mainstream pop elements and traditional Turkish roots.
The study also indicates that what fascinates the girls interviewed is not only the Turkish roots or hybridity inherent in Tarkan, Mustafa Sandal and Ebru Gündeş’s music. These girls, the data indicates, are also fascinated by the biographies of the singers.
At this point in the article, there is more emphasis on Tarkan and how the girls interviewed relate to Tarkan. It appears that Tarkan has created the image of a rebel in their eyes by refusing to do his compulsory military service in 1999. According to Ernest and Moser, this in many ways “mirrors the inherent conflicts of migrant adolescents with the values and expectations of their country of origin”.
By referring to Tarkan’s biography on Stars on Top, Ernest and Moser also argue that as a person who was born in Germany and partly grew up in İstanbul, Tarkan displays hybrid characteristics. They continue: “Tarkan is the perfect representation of a hybrid lifestyle, incorporating all the tensions, fears, and hopes of his mainly Turkish audience. He contests traditional Turkish behavior and at the same time he is a star successful in Turkey and all over Europe.. a perfect mixture of Western originality and Turkish romanticism”.
