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 tara (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), tara 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 tara as its central analytic and informed by postcolonial, psychoanalytical, and critical theory, the book examines the extent to which dominant codings of tara are affirmed and/or complicated in cinematic and literary narratives by award-winning filmmakers Nuri BilgeCeylan and Fatih Akn and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Examines conceptualizations of tasra (the provincial) in contemporary Turkish film and literature Demonstrates how Turkish politics and culture have opened up to, and been opened up by, transnational processes Interrogates Turkey's complicated relationship to European hegemony through a postcolonial lens

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

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Concepts and Frameworks: Tara from Modernization to Globalization.- 3. Tara, Temporality, and Melancholia in Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul.- 4. Fatih Akn's Crossing the Bridge: Turkey as Europe's Tasra, or Limitations of a Metaphor.- 5. Provincializing The Metropolitan Center: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Tasras.- 6. Conclusion.