Protest music and collective memory in Turkey: From 1970s student activism to the 2013 Gezi Park protests

This article examines protest music as a repertoire of collective action and mnemonic device in Turkey. Comparing the 1970s student movements with the 2013 Gezi Park protests, it asks how musical practices travel across protest cycles and become durable resources for political action, as well as for remembering, narrating, and re-experiencing contentious experiences. The analysis draws on 30 semi-structured interviews (13 from the 1970s generation and 17 from Gezi protestors) and a song-recall exercise, in which movement-associated tracks were played and discussed. Across both periods, participants identify shared protest functions of music, including collective identity and unity; motivation, resistance, and resilience ; and expression and communication . Yet musical styles and modes of engagement diverge. The 1970s repertoire is characterized by hard-edged, didactic, and disciplined elements, with a focus on marches and ideological boundary work. Gezi, by contrast, is remembered as a heterogeneous, carnivalesque “sonic world” marked by spontaneity, humor, and polyphony. Finally, the findings reveal music’s ambivalent mnemonic force: songs trigger vivid autobiographical memories and bodily affects, from hope and pleasure to nostalgia, grief, and episodic trauma, as they accumulate layered meanings through subsequent events. The article contributes to social movement and memory scholarship by theorizing protest music as an intergenerational cultural resource that outlives specific cycles of contention.