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

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. Acknowledgments Contents Chapter 1: Introduction References Chapter 2: Concepts and Frameworks: Taşra from Modernization to Globalization 2.1 Taşra and Modernization 2.2 Between the Abject and the Authentic: The Production of Taşra as Supplement in Modern Turkey 2.3 The “Internally excluded”: Taşra as Supplement in Global Capitalism References Chapter 3: Taşra, Temporality, and Melancholia in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul 3.1 Mourning and Melancholic Grieving: A Theoretical Discussion 3.2 Temporality, Melancholy, and the City as Taşra 3.3 Melancholic Speech and Sublimation in Istanbul References Chapter 4: Fatih Akın’s Crossing the Bridge: Turkey as Europe’s Taşra, or Limitations of a Metaphor 4.1 On the Reception of Crossing the Bridge 4.2 From Hybridity to “Authenticity” 4.3 The Metaphor of the Bridge and Its Discontents 4.4 Coda References Chapter 5: Provincializing The Metropolitan Center: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Taşras 5.1 Climates: Taşra Within the Subject 5.2 Three Monkeys: Taşra Within the City 5.3 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: Taşra and Modernity 5.4 Sight and Smell References Chapter 6: Conclusion References Index This book explores Turkey's complicated relationship to modernity and its status within the new global order by tracing the ambivalent ways in which tasra (the provinces) is constituted in contemporary Turkish cinema and literature.