embodiments of taşra in the works of orhan pamuk, nuri̇ bi̇lge ceylan, and fati̇h akin evren ozselc

219 Pages·2015·1.24 MB·English

by  Evren Ozselcuk

TURKEY’S INTERNAL OTHER:
EMBODIMENTS OF TAŞRA IN THE WORKS OF
ORHAN PAMUK, NURİ BİLGE CEYLAN, AND FATİH AKIN

EVREN OZSELCUK

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE
STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

JOINT GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE
YORK UNIVERSITY
TORONTO, ONTARIO

May 2015
© Evren Ozselcuk, 2015
ABSTRACT
In Turkey, the concept of taşra connotes much more than its immediate spatial
meaning as those places outside of the city center(s). Its extensive circulation as a trope
that indicates externality to modernity is inextricably linked to the specific configurations
of the project of Turkish modernization. In this dissertation, I draw from the insights of
postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis to develop a novel conceptualization of taşra,
through which I interpret Turkey’s complicated relationship to modernity and its status
within the new global order. I argue that a close analysis of the dominant discourses on
taşra is revealing, for it constitutes one primary site where the predicaments and
contradictions of Turkish modernization and national identity-constitution are played out,
where collective anxieties around these issues continue to be projected and managed. In
my analysis of these discourses, I adopt a deconstructive rather than a corrective
approach: my objective is not to reveal what taşra “really” is but what work it is made to
do.
The contemporary cinematic and literary texts that I engage with in this study are
the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005),
Turkish-German director Fatih Akın’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of
Istanbul (2005) and three films by the pioneer of the new genre of taşra films in Turkey,
Nuri Bilge Ceylan—namely Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008) and Once Upon a
Time in Anatolia (2011). Through close readings of these texts, I illustrate how each
complicates, affirms and/or expands received understandings of taşra that celebrate
and/or denounce it as being culturally, spatially and temporally external to modernity.
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DEDICATION
To my father Mehmet Erdinç Özselçuk (1936-2015) who waited enough to see me
through.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The completion of this dissertation would not be possible if it were not for the
continued support and encouragement of many people. My supervisor, Monique
Tschofen, has been an amazing mentor. Frankly, I cannot find adequate words to describe
her formative contributions, over many years, to my intellectual and professional
development. I am inspired by her commitment to rigorous thinking and sharp analysis,
by her ability to offer guidance and support with such incredible precision and
promptness. Her sustained faith in my work, her care and generosity are true gifts for
which I will continue to be grateful. I want to thank Sedef Arat-Koç not only for her
thoughtful comments and careful interventions into the project, but also for the vigorous
conversations I had with her about Turkish politics, films, TV shows, books and about
life in general. I am thankful to Paul Antze for his insightful questions about the project
at each and every committee meeting. Nima Naghibi extended her support during the
early stages of the project. I also want to thank Angelica Fenner and Amila Buturovic for
graciously agreeing to serve as members of my defense committee.
Outside of my committee, I also would like to thank Jody Berland and Nalini
Persram in whose seminars I first started to formulate the main ideas of this dissertation. I
am grateful to Anne MacLennan for supporting my proposal for a senior seminar that
drew from my dissertation research and for making it possible for me to teach it at York
in 2012-2013. Special thanks to Diane Jenner and Stephanie Margetts who made sure, all
through my M.A. and Ph.D. in the Communication and Culture Program at York, that no
administrative question I had remained unresolved.
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I am indebted to my interlocutors Greg Flemming, Matt Flisfeder and Concetta
Principe in the weekly reading group through 2008-2010. Sheila Koenig, Sarah Sharma,
Craig Medows, Kara Peet and Paul Telford are friends and intellectual comrades who
sustained me during my graduate studies and made life fulfilling and less difficult with
their love, care, and ideas. I am thankful also to friends in Istanbul, especially to Seda
Kalem, Enis Rıza, Ebru Şeremetli, Bahriye Kabadayı Dal, Nalân Sakızlı and İlker Ataç.
My deepest thanks go to my confidant Erkan Erçel for his continuous collegiality and for
cheering me on in my endeavors. I would also like to thank friends in my new home in
Columbia, South Carolina: Susan Courtney, Bob Bohl, Rebecca Stern, Nina Levine,
Catherine Keyser, Paul Famolari, Agnes Mueller and Nicholas Vazsonyi.
My sister Ceren Özselçuk enriches my life with her intellectual dynamism and
marvelous wit. I cannot thank her enough for all her intellectual, emotional and financial
support that has kept me sane through my graduate studies. I am grateful to my parents
İnci and Erdinç Özselçuk. They have shown much patience and understanding all along
this long process.
Finally, I want to express my immeasurable gratitude to Greg Forter without whose
love, support and encouragement this dissertation would not have materialized. He
listened without complaint to my ramblings and helped me find my way through knotted
ideas. Each time my writing felt like closing down on itself, he led me towards whole
new paths. Scrupulously, he read and commented on every page of every draft. But above
all else, with his sheer presence in my life, he has imbued all experience with a touch of
glory.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgements iv
Table of Contents vi
Introduction 1
I. Concepts and Frameworks: Taşra from Modernization 13
to Globalization
I.1. Taşra and Modernization 13
I.2. Between the Abject and the Authentic: 22
The Production of Taşra as Supplement in Modern Turkey
I.3. The “internally-excluded”: Taşra as Supplement 31
in Global Capitalism
II. Taşra, Belatedness and Melancholy in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul 40
II.1. Mourning and Melancholic Grieving: 51
A Theoretical Discussion
II.2. Belatedness, Melancholy and the City as Taşra 62
II.3. Melancholic Speech and Sublimation in Istanbul 78

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III. Taşra and the Failure of Liberal Hybridity 88
in Fatih Akın’s Crossing The Bridge
III.1. From Hybridity to “Authenticity” 95
III.2. The Metaphor of the Bridge and Its Discontents 112
IV. Provincializing the Metropolitan Center: 124
Taşra in the Late Work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan
IV.1. Climates: Taşra within the Subject 135
IV.2. Three Monkeys: Taşra within the City 155
IV.3. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: Taşra and Modernity 170
IV.3.a. Sight and Smell 178
Afterword 190
Works Cited 196

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INTRODUCTION

It is difficult to think seriously about modern Turkey without invoking the concept
of taşra. It has been the object of state policies and a domain of struggle for political
power; it has intrigued numerous novelists, poets and filmmakers; it has been the explicit
subject and/or the constitutive background of popular songs and hit TV series; it has
served as a condescending shorthand to indicate a particular kind of cultural difference
coded as unmodern or anti-modern. And yet, this oversaturated concept with conflicting
significations has a relatively short history. It was only at the end of the nineteenth
century that taşra, a term used to describe administrative regions outside the centers—a
term that indicated provinces—started to connote much more than this immediate
meaning. Notably, the term’s transformation coincides with the beginning of a process of
reformation and modernization in the Ottoman Empire, which at the time was trying to
resist the threat of European colonialism (Laçiner, 2005; Alkan, 2005). In this sense, the
making of taşra is inextricably linked to the specific configuration of modernity and
modernization in Turkey.1 It is precisely in this respect that a close analysis of the
discourses on taşra is revealing, for it constitutes one primary site where dilemmas and
predicaments of Turkish modernization and national identity-constitution are played out,
where collective anxieties around these issues continue to be projected and managed.
My dissertation is an extended reflection on contemporary cinematic and literary
engagements with this concept. My primary texts are the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s

1 Here is perhaps the place to note that the term “taşra” was not always equally central to defining
the distinction between center and periphery. For earlier conceptions, see especially Hanioğlu (2008);
Barkey (2008); Quataert (2000).
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memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005 [2003]), Turkish-German director Fatih
Akın’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) and three films
by the pioneer of the new genre of taşra films in Turkey, Nuri Bilge Ceylan—namely
Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008) and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).
Through close readings of these texts, I illustrate how each complicates, affirms and/or
expands received understandings of taşra that cherish and/or denounce it as being
culturally, spatially and temporally external to modernity.
This is a project that is inspired by and builds upon some recent intellectual
deliberations in Turkey that take a poststructuralist approach to thinking about taşra. My
reflections have been shaped particularly by the articles that appeared in 2005 in the
edited volume Taşraya Bakmak (“Looking at Taşra”). Representing a variety of
disciplinary perspectives, from political science to women’s studies, from history to
literature, what these articles seemed to me to have shared is a consistent occupation with
problematizing the dominant narratives that construct taşra rather than taşra itself. By
shifting the focus in this manner onto the constitution of the dominant narratives, the
articles have enabled also an epistemological shift, a new way of “looking at” taşra, that
sees in it not a pure outside—not the provinces as the binary opposite of the center—but
how the center produces taşra in this way in the first place to procure its integral unity
and facilitate domination of what it produces as “margin.” The insights from this edited
volume allowed me to conceive that the particular construction and narrativization of
taşra as external are indications of the center’s own discontinuity with itself; that they
point at the center’s attempts at covering over and disavowing internal disarray and
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disruption through exteriorization (Chakrabarty 2000). Pursuing these lines of thinking,
in turn, aided me in conceptualizing taşra in this dissertation, especially in my readings
of Ceylan’s films in Chapter Four, as a constitutive outside in the fashion of the
Derridean supplement.
Literary critic Nurdan Gürbilek’s (1995) influential essay on what she called “taşra
gloom” (“taşra sıkıntısı”) has been instructive in the formulation of some other
fundamental ideas in the dissertation. In this compelling essay, the influence of which is
also palpable in different ways in most of the articles collected in the volume I referenced
above, Gürbilek elaborates on the affective tones of the Turkish novelist Yusuf Atılgan’s
work. Amongst them, she singles out a pervasive gloom that is associated with a kind of
“privation” that “burns and shrivels the subject from the inside” (53-55, my translation).
While for Gürbilek “the most naked and visible expression” of such gloom is embodied
in taşra, she also renders the affect more proximate and familiar by relating it to a much
more diffuse existential experience of “confinement” and “internal narrowing” (55-56,
my translation). This experience, she explains, is occasioned by the knowledge of an
other, better, fuller, more gratifying course of existence (i.e., the center) from which one
feels insurmountably excluded. Such knowledge itself is shaped as much by socially-
informed fantasy as by the center’s dominating presence. Gürbilek discerns the gloom
that saturates this experience, in the predicament of a woman, for example, who is
“obliged to always sleep in the same bed with an undesired husband” (55, my
translation); or she detects it, in another essay, in the kind of disappointment that
“urbanites would recognize” on those Sunday afternoons which start to feel “protracted”
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