Writing Cyprus

This book breaks new ground by being the first study of the literatures of Cyprus from a postcolonial and partition perspective combined with spatial considerations. The book puts Cyprus on the postcolonial partition map, whilst rewriting, making and breaking the postcolonial partition map through the Meditereanean island of Cyprus.

Bahriye Kemal's ground-breaking new work serves as the first study of the literatures of Cyprus from a postcolonial and partition perspective. Her book explores Anglophone, Hellenophone and Turkophone writings from the 1920s to the present.

Drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan's humanistic geography and Henri Lefebvre's Marxist philosophy, Kemal proposes a new interdisciplinary spatial model, at once theoretical and empirical, that demonstrates the power of space and place in postcolonial partition cases. The book shows the ways that place and space determine identity so as to create identifications; together these places, spaces and identifications are always in production. In analysing practices of writing, inventing, experiencing, reading, and construction, the book offers a distinct 'solidarity' that captures the 'truth of space' and place for the production of multiple-mutable Cypruses shaped by and for multiple-mutable selves, ending in a 'differential' Cyprus, Mediterranean, and world.

*Writing Cyprus* offers not only a nuanced understanding of the actual and active production of colonialism, postcolonialism and partition that dismantles the dominant binary legacy of historical-political deadlock discourse, but a fruitful model for understanding other sites of conflict and division

Autorentext

Bahriye Kemal is a lecturer in postcolonial and contemporary literatures at the University of Kent. Her teaching and research engage with postcolonial and partition studies, comparative Ottoman and British imperialism, spatial studies, migration, comparative literature, Postcolonial Eastern Mediterranean, postcolonial islands, solidarity and activism. Her articles on anticolonial gendered nationalism, the postcolonial partitioned diaspora, and the East Mediterranean have appeared in various postcolonial journals. She is co-editor of Visa Stories: Experiences between Law and Migration (2013), and Nicosia beyond barriers: Voices from a divided city (2019). She is currently writing a book on the postcolonial Mediterranean, with focus on literature and arts from Cyprus, Palestine, Syria and beyond.

Inhalt

1. Introduction of a Postcolonial and Partitioned Place, Space and Identity
2. Literature Education Across Dominant-Emergent (Post)Colonial Partition Positions: Hyphenated Turkish-Cypriotists and Greek-Cypriotists
3. Ethnic Motherland Nationalists: Mothers' Blood and Spiritual Place
4. Colonialist, Communist, Post-1964/74 Partition Moment: UnHyphenated DeEthnicised Cypriotists
5. Rhythmanalysts of Post-Linobambakoi Diaspora: Transnational Whale of Space/Place We Can All Inhabit