Overview
- 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
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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 BilgeCeylan and Fatih Akın and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.
Reviews
“Skillfully demonstrating how orientalism is translated by Turkish nationalism into an opposition between the urban and the provincial (“taşra”), this book offers a new framework for understanding contemporary Turkish culture. Its close readings make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the postcolonial world by showing how the modernity of the nation found its negative energy in what it deemed provincial. Özselçuk develops a thought-provoking account of the complex relationship between cultural works and neo-liberal populism. Her book makes a unique contribution to scholarship in several fields, including Turkish Studies, postcolonial cultural studies, film and media studies and literary criticism.” (Mahmut Mutman, Professor and Senior Researcher, Institute for Advanced Social Research, Tampere University, Finland)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Evren Özselçuk teaches in the Department of English and the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of South Carolina, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Provincial and The Postcolonial in Cultural Texts from Late Modern Turkey
Authors: Evren Özselçuk
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04666-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-04665-0Published: 27 July 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-04668-1Published: 28 July 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-04666-7Published: 26 July 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 186
Topics: European Cinema and TV, Global Cinema and TV, European Literature, European Culture, Postcolonial/World Literature, Cultural Theory