Disorienting the Oriental(ist): Reading the Mists of Istanbul

Join Dr. Esra Almas in a discussion on how a focus on the Orient would impact the understanding of disorientation and what would disorientation signify when it comes to discussions of the Orient and Orientalism.

Esra Almas completed her PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, where she also taught in the department of Literary Studies. Her dissertation explored the links between literary capital and Istanbul's literary cityscape in Orhan Pamuk's work. Her research interests include Turkish and Turkic diaspora, exile narratives, urban imaginary and critical theory. She currently teaches literature and communication at Dogus University, Istanbul.

 

The heart of the matter with disorientation, etymologically speaking, is the Orient. The root of the term originally designated a particular direction, from where the sun rises (with a nod to the biblical fiat Oriente lux), and by extension, a specific geographic location, Asia. Even this slight detour is disorienting, as it brings the myriad connotations associated with the Orient. As a concept and a geographical gesture, the Orient appears as a necessary component of identity, central to a sense of direction. Reciprocally, its loss or turning away from it, both implicates and indicates confusion. 

 

The etymological disorientation informs the main question of this lecture: how would a focus on the Orient impact the understanding of disorientation, and reciprocally, what would disorientation signify when it comes to discussions of the Orient and Orientalism? Acknowledged today as a pejorative term, the Orient mostly exists as an object and a subject of the Imperial West, pointing to the opposition between the Orient and the Occident, and its asymmetrical hierarchies. In today's age of Western dominated modernity where Western modes of knowing are unavoidable, Orientalism has become a ubiquitous practice. A particular case is Orientalist self representations, tactical interventions whereby the East speaks back by appropriating the stereotype. Orientalist representations no longer serve as markers of cultural origin or agency; instead they point towards imprecision, disorienting the distinctions they have been founded upon. 

I argue in this lecture that these terms inform the work of the Turkish novelist and 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk's current international significance mainly derives from his complex representations of Turkish cultural identity and his resulting role as an intermediary between East and West. Pamuk's work has a peculiar relevance: characterized by a narrative and content that clouds the cognitive skills of the reader, it draws from the Ottoman past to problematize the Republican present. I trace Pamuk's disorienting Orientalism in the hazy cityscape of his memoir Istanbul: Şehir ve Hatıralar (Istanbul: Memories and the City) (2003) to explore, problematize and aestheticize the hierarchies the discourse and the city are associated with.

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