Archival silences, ambivalent repertoires: Melis Sökmen and the political lives of Black femme performance in Turkey

Despite their politically complex and aesthetically innovative works, Black performers in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey have received limited scholarly attention. As one of the first critical studies of a Black performer from Turkey, this essay traces the life and career of Melis Sökmen (b. 1964), following her trajectory from the post-coup advertising industry and festival circuits, to a prominent voice in the 1990s pop music boom, to a respected artist active in Black community events, U.S. cultural diplomacy in Turkey, and Turkey's diplomatic initiatives in Africa. Sökmen has cultivated a repertoire through which the afterlives of Ottoman, Turkish, African, German, Cypriot, and North American racial and gender formations are negotiated – not through transparent resistance, but through layered ambivalence, aesthetic labor, and strategic presence. This article offers a historical overview of Black performance cultures in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, highlighting overlooked figures and formations that have shaped these intersecting archives and repertoires. Rather than uncritically celebrating Sökmen's performances or framing her participation in nationalist, neoliberal, or neo-imperial circuits as complicity, it attends to the ambivalent negotiations that structure her artistic and political labor: acts shaped by survival, aspiration, and the unstable optics of racialized femininity under structural inequality.