Transcultures of Literature in Turkey
This seminar invites new approaches to the contested sites of transnationalism, cultural difference, collective memory and translation in Turkish literature. These new spaces have gained prominence as a result of Turkey’s “global turn” in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup. On one hand, the pressures of globalization have led to new “revisionist” readings of the foundational narratives of the Republic as well as the desire to recognize points of suture between constructed categories such as “nation,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” and “religion.” On the other hand, the new situation has also triggered various affects of paranoia, conspiracy, and even claustrophobia – a strong mood of survival and alertness to some perceived danger from the outside, imagined as the extinction of the nation. Addressing the need for new paradigms of comparativism in the study of national literatures, the seminar aims to resituate (“translate”) the Turkish literary field away from static national categories of analysis into zones of comparison that foreground alterity, contestation and displacement by exploring new venues of textuality and translatability between elided national fragments and disparate cultural contexts. We invite proposals that examine transnational and translational iterations of contemporary Turkish writing at the intersections of different social spaces, histories, and languages.