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