Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies / Litera: Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2021
Aziyadé (1879) and Fantôme d'Orient (1891), an autobiographical debut novel and a travel narrativ... more Aziyadé (1879) and Fantôme d'Orient (1891), an autobiographical debut novel and a travel narrative by Pierre Loti, are key texts in French exoticist literature. Set in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of its disintegration, Loti's debut novel illustrates a young man's discovery of life à la turque through an account of his stay in Istanbul and his liaison with Aziyadé, a young married Turkish woman from a harem. The affair ended with his departure, but Loti's fondness for Istanbul remained. He returned to the city ten years later, as a best-selling literary writer and a member of the Academie Française, to seek the traces of his past. Fantôme d'Orient is the account of his three-day stay in search of his Turkish life and a self-reflexive meditation on memory, loss, death, and distance. Loti's Turkish persona and profound attachment to the country raise questions on affect and affinity, or on what it means to write as a Turcophile. Taking its cue from the links among exoticism, imperialism and travel writing, this paper illustrates the personal, the political, and the poetic implications of Loti's assumed Turkish identity. Focusing on affect and rhetoric, it seeks to answer how affinity shapes discourses conditioned by power and empire, highlighting its poetic potential and political sensibilities.
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Papers by Esra Almas
This essay investigates the role of Istanbul, and of drastic urban
change, in the shaping of a particular form of autoethnograpy,
and, reciprocally, the role of life writing as a particular constituent
of the city’s urban imaginary. The focus is the upscale
cosmopolitan neighborhood of Nişantaşı, as seen largely through
Jewish eyes, in the memoirs by the dissident writer and poet Roni
Margulies: Jews Go Wild on Sundays [Margulies, Roni. 2006.
Bugün Pazar Yahudiler Azar [Jews Go Wild on Sundays]. Istanbul:
Kanat.], and My Family and Other Jews [Margulies, Roni. 2018.
Ailem ve Diğer Yahudiler [My Family and Other Jews]. A published
poet, journalist and member of the Turkish Workers Party,
Margulies has been active in Turkey as a public intellectual. His
memoirs are poetic, political, and humorous. They combine
literary sensibilities with political commitments, addressing
multiple tensions that have molded his identity as a Turkish Jew.
The focus on Jewish lives provides a kaleidoscopic perspective to
the city, the neighborhood, and to the practice of writing from
the periphery. Retrospective but not nostalgic, Margulies takes
issue with the notions of home and homeland, revealing the
complexity of affinities. Margulies’s memoirs help reconsider the
parameters of autoethnography, a mode of reading that questions
not only the links between the auto and ethnos, but also the
hierarchies between minor and major, center and periphery.
Sürgünde Vals: Kenizé Mourad'ın Saraydan Sürgüne adlı romanında sürgün ve kadın Öz Kenizé Mourad'ın Saraydan Sürgüne (1987) adlı romanı Selma adındaki Osmanlı prensesinin iki dünya savaşı arasında kıtalar, kültürler ve başkentleri kat eden (İstanbul, Beyrut, Badalpour ve Paris) hikayesini konu alır. Selma imparatorlukların çöküşü, milliyetçiliğin yükselişi ve dünya savaşları ile örülmüş sorunlu bir dönemin kilit tarihine tanıklık etmektedir. Selma'nın bu göçebe öyküsü yaşanan felaketlere ışık tutmanın yanı sıra susturulmuş ve bastırılmış farklı kadın deneyimlerine de göndermede bulunmaktadır. Romanda Selma'nın yaşadığı mekânsal değişimler ile içsel benliğinin yaşadığı başkalaşım arasında bir bağlantı bulunmaktadır. Ayrıca, kendini ifade etme aracı olarak dans kavramının varlığı, Selma'nın kimliğinin gelişimini tartışmak için uygun bir noktaya getirmektedir. Bu makale, romanda bir mekân olarak sürgün kavramının ve kadın varlığının ne şekilde temsil edildiğini ve metnin gidiş ve dönüşler arasındaki gezici niteliğinin bu kavramları nasıl
offers a productive way of approaching disorientation conceptually: the image of the city reveals a struggle to orient itself amidst and across discourses of Orientalism
and modernity. Within that struggle, the city’s metaphorical fogs, from the prototypical representation of the city’s fogs by the modernist poet Tevfik Fikret to Prince Abdu¨lmecid’s eponymous painting, from the Republican writer Ahmet
Hamdi Tanpınar’s transmutative dream to the melancholy mists of Orhan
Pamuk, constitute an unlikely guide to its exceptional experience of disorientation. The city constantly changes and various forms of literary or figurative fog accompany experiences of disorientation especially during the fraught transition between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, where the discourses of modernity and Orientalism coalesce and disorient one another. Each instance of fog/mist discloses something about the struggle to orient the city, as well as the struggle with ‘the Orient’.
This essay investigates the role of Istanbul, and of drastic urban
change, in the shaping of a particular form of autoethnograpy,
and, reciprocally, the role of life writing as a particular constituent
of the city’s urban imaginary. The focus is the upscale
cosmopolitan neighborhood of Nişantaşı, as seen largely through
Jewish eyes, in the memoirs by the dissident writer and poet Roni
Margulies: Jews Go Wild on Sundays [Margulies, Roni. 2006.
Bugün Pazar Yahudiler Azar [Jews Go Wild on Sundays]. Istanbul:
Kanat.], and My Family and Other Jews [Margulies, Roni. 2018.
Ailem ve Diğer Yahudiler [My Family and Other Jews]. A published
poet, journalist and member of the Turkish Workers Party,
Margulies has been active in Turkey as a public intellectual. His
memoirs are poetic, political, and humorous. They combine
literary sensibilities with political commitments, addressing
multiple tensions that have molded his identity as a Turkish Jew.
The focus on Jewish lives provides a kaleidoscopic perspective to
the city, the neighborhood, and to the practice of writing from
the periphery. Retrospective but not nostalgic, Margulies takes
issue with the notions of home and homeland, revealing the
complexity of affinities. Margulies’s memoirs help reconsider the
parameters of autoethnography, a mode of reading that questions
not only the links between the auto and ethnos, but also the
hierarchies between minor and major, center and periphery.
Sürgünde Vals: Kenizé Mourad'ın Saraydan Sürgüne adlı romanında sürgün ve kadın Öz Kenizé Mourad'ın Saraydan Sürgüne (1987) adlı romanı Selma adındaki Osmanlı prensesinin iki dünya savaşı arasında kıtalar, kültürler ve başkentleri kat eden (İstanbul, Beyrut, Badalpour ve Paris) hikayesini konu alır. Selma imparatorlukların çöküşü, milliyetçiliğin yükselişi ve dünya savaşları ile örülmüş sorunlu bir dönemin kilit tarihine tanıklık etmektedir. Selma'nın bu göçebe öyküsü yaşanan felaketlere ışık tutmanın yanı sıra susturulmuş ve bastırılmış farklı kadın deneyimlerine de göndermede bulunmaktadır. Romanda Selma'nın yaşadığı mekânsal değişimler ile içsel benliğinin yaşadığı başkalaşım arasında bir bağlantı bulunmaktadır. Ayrıca, kendini ifade etme aracı olarak dans kavramının varlığı, Selma'nın kimliğinin gelişimini tartışmak için uygun bir noktaya getirmektedir. Bu makale, romanda bir mekân olarak sürgün kavramının ve kadın varlığının ne şekilde temsil edildiğini ve metnin gidiş ve dönüşler arasındaki gezici niteliğinin bu kavramları nasıl
offers a productive way of approaching disorientation conceptually: the image of the city reveals a struggle to orient itself amidst and across discourses of Orientalism
and modernity. Within that struggle, the city’s metaphorical fogs, from the prototypical representation of the city’s fogs by the modernist poet Tevfik Fikret to Prince Abdu¨lmecid’s eponymous painting, from the Republican writer Ahmet
Hamdi Tanpınar’s transmutative dream to the melancholy mists of Orhan
Pamuk, constitute an unlikely guide to its exceptional experience of disorientation. The city constantly changes and various forms of literary or figurative fog accompany experiences of disorientation especially during the fraught transition between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, where the discourses of modernity and Orientalism coalesce and disorient one another. Each instance of fog/mist discloses something about the struggle to orient the city, as well as the struggle with ‘the Orient’.
Among his few works available in Turkish, the one that clearly reveals his ideology is his novel Uyge Taba (Towards Home), a Turanian fantasy of homecoming. Written in Tatar, or Eastern Turkish in Ishaki’s words, the novel was published in Berlin in 1922. Ishaki translated it to what he calls Anatolian Turkish in 1941, with the aim of introducing to the Turks of Turkey the lifestyle and values of the Turks from other lands, notably from former Russia. The novel tells the story of Miralay Demir Ali, a frustrated Turkic lieutenant in the Russian army, and how, through chance encounters with fellow Turks, especially through dinners with the family of his late wife’s friend, he remembers his Turkish identity and his true affiliations. Demir Ali then plots his desertion of the Russian Army, inciting his Turkish soldiers to accompany him in joining the Ottoman army, in the true Turanian spirit. Uyge Taba mobilizes the imagery of home to build a shared motherland for a scattered people. This paper looks at how the idea of a common home – origin and destination – is imagined in the novel and how historical symbols and everyday practices join forces in building the imaginary homeland.