Although there was a palpable interest in literature from Turkey following Orhan Pamuk’s 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, translations have been limited to a few select figures, either canonical figures of Modern Turkish literature from the last century or mainstream authors writing for a commercial global market. Additionally, the hypervisibility of authors like Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak who continue to reproduce the East and West binary in their work has lead to fallacious scholarly engagements with Turkish literature that tokenize it as a discursive domain in which issues such as civilized/uncivilized, developed/backward, liberal/conservative, secular/religious are worked out.
This special session on new directions in contemporary Turkish literature complicates this kind of approach by focusing on novels, authors and literary movements that go beyond these binaries and that envision new paradigms for approaching politically engaged works from un(der)translated literary traditions. We bring together literary works produced in Turkey in the past two decades that touch on the 2020 Presidential Theme “Being Human.” Drawing on a range of methodologies such as ecocriticism, queer studies, crip theory, critical theory and gender studies, our panel interrogates how contemporary Turkish literature portrays the constantly changing relationship between ideal citizenship and the queer, crip, ethnic minority, political dissident and otherwise marginalized subjects of the nation. In so doing, these papers delineate the conditions of political and social belonging, personhood and access to human rights for these literary characters with marginalized subjectivities.
Our panel will consist of three presentations of 15 minutes each, followed by comments from a respondent, and an open-format discussion with the audience. In “Queerness and Disability in Murat Uyurkulak’s Merhume,” Duygu Ula takes up questions of the possibilities afforded to queer and disabled bodies in contemporary Turkish fiction. Unlike most political novelists from Turkey, translated or otherwise, Uyurkulak envisions characters that exist in the intersection of complex and marginalized ethnic, class, gender, sexual and disabled identities. Ula focuses on Murat Uyurkulak’s most recent novel of a dystopian Turkey, Merhume, in which the stories of queer, disabled and otherwise marginalized characters are embedded within the real and an imagined political history of Turkey. Writing these characters into this often violent and oppressive political history, Ula argues, works to write into the literary archive queer and disabled subjects who experience the political realities of the country no less than abled, heterosexual and often male characters typical of political fiction from Turkey. Moreover, Uyurkulak envisions a queer and crip future for the country that has long oppressed these communities and pushed them out of the public eye. Drawing on crip and queer theory, Ula argues that Merhume centers queer and crip subjects and their community building practices as an alternative model of social and political engagement, and interrogates the significance of dystopian fiction as a genre for creating these new visions for the future.
In “From Reprieve to Repression: Turkish Literature in the Age of “Advanced Democracy,” Basak Çandar proposes an analysis of the absurdist Turkish novel of the 2000s as representative of a new shift in Turkish literature, which coincides with the harsh political turns of the twenty-first century, from relative political stability to staggering repression, all during an era of “ileri demokrasi” (advanced democracy). Çandar suggests that the “absurd” emerges as especially capable of articulating the senselessness of this period, simultaneously capable of political critique and political detachment. To demonstrate this shift towards the absurd, Çandar turns to Afili Filintalar, a loosely defined literary group that came to prominence in Turkey in the early 2000s, including the authors, Murat Uyurkulak, Alper Canıgüz, and Murat Menteş, who embrace the absurd for different purposes. By analyzing their distinct literary sensibilities, Çandar studies literary absurdism vis-à-vis political repression. Such a focus, she argues, can introduce new venues of comparison that put Turkish Literature in dialogue with other contemporary literary traditions.
In “Non-human Voices, Porous Bodies: The Eco-Narratives of Latife Tekin” Hale Şirin posits that Latife Tekin, one of the most prominent figures of contemporary Turkish literature, have much to contribute to eco-political criticism. While Tekin’s engagement with politics and environmental concerns are already evident in her early novels, such as her first book, Sevgili Arsız Ölüm (published in 1983 translated into English as Dear Shameless Death in 2001) there is a distinct turn to ecological and political issues in Tekin's work after 2000. Tekin's narratives unsettle the categories of genre, as they lie somewhere between prose and poetry, resisting the traditional structures of both. These narratives are not conveyed by a single voice, but they embody multiplicities, while they nevertheless remain "unpossessed, plurivocal, and murmur-like." This paper focuses on four of her later works, Ormanda Ölüm Yokmuş [There is No Death in the Forest] (2001), Unutma Bahçesi [Garden of Forgetting] (2004), Muinar [2006] and Rüyalar ve Uyanışlar Defteri (Notebook of Dreams and Awakenings] (2009), and argues that through their innovative language and narrative components, Tekin's eco-narratives challenge the notions of belonging and possessing, the boundary between the public and the private, the human and the non-human and the body and the world.
The presentations will be followed by short remarks from the respondent, Ali Bolcakan, who will contextualize these works within the current state of Turkish literature for a diverse audience and will connect these papers together to argue how contemporary Turkish literature is affected by and responds to internal and external political exigencies in different and sometimes contradictory ways, and will open it up for discussion.