The Provincial and The Postcolonial in Cultural Texts from Late Modern Turkey

ISBN-13: 9783031046681 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023

Evren Özselçuk

Opis

This book explores Turkey’s complicated relationship to modernity and its status within the new global order by tracing the ambivalent ways in which taşra (the provinces) is constituted in contemporary Turkish cinema and literature. Connoting much more than its immediate spatial meaning as those places outside of the center(s), taşra is a way of naming what modernity decries as spatial peripherality, temporal belatedness, and cultural backwardness. It has functioned historically as a psychosocial repository for what Turkish modernity degrades and disavows, enabling a mapping of the predicaments and contradictions of Turkish modernization and national identity-constitution. Organized around taşra as its central analytic and informed by postcolonial, psychoanalytical, and critical theory, the book examines the extent to which dominant codings of taşra are affirmed and/or complicated in cinematic and literary narratives by award-winning filmmakers Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Fatih Akın and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Spis treści

1. Introduction.

2. Concepts and Frameworks: Taşra from Modernization to Globalization.

3. Taşra, Temporality, and Melancholia in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul.

4. Fatih Akın’s Crossing the Bridge: Turkey as Europe’s Taşra, or Limitations of a Metaphor.

5. Provincializing The Metropolitan Center: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Taşras.

6. Conclusion.

O autorze

Evren Özselçuk teaches in the Department of English and the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of South Carolina, USA.   

Blurb

This book explores Turkey’s complicated relationship to modernity and its status within the new global order by tracing the ambivalent ways in which taşra (the provinces) is constituted in contemporary Turkish cinema and literature. Connoting much more than its immediate spatial meaning as those places outside of the center(s), taşra is a way of naming what modernity decries as spatial peripherality, temporal belatedness, and cultural backwardness. It has functioned historically as a psychosocial repository for what Turkish modernity degrades and disavows, enabling a mapping of the predicaments and contradictions of Turkish modernization and national identity-constitution. Organized around taşra as its central analytic and informed by postcolonial, psychoanalytical, and critical theory, the book examines the extent to which dominant codings of taşra are affirmed and/or complicated in cinematic and literary narratives by award-winning filmmakers Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Fatih Akın and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Evren Özselçuk teaches in the Department of English and the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of South Carolina, USA.