Introduction: Exiles at Home—Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies

Extract

Replacing truth with nontruth was difficult but fun at the same time. Crossing the borders of truth …, words assume a talismanic spell. Only then does the word know that it is much more than a word.

—Murat Uyurkulak, Har (96; my trans.)

In the consolidation of the nation-state, literature has served as one of the most prominent “representational machineries” of national culture (Prasad 72), but claiming that all or most Third World fiction writers articulate the national defeats the most important attribute of literature—its political and aesthetic autonomy. The articles in this cluster all discuss authors who, in Orhan Pamuk's term, do not feel “at home” at home. These authors' literary and philosophical expressions of alienation illustrate the necessity to challenge the universalisms of global literary studies, particularly the way Third World literatures are nationalized. Global literary studies has categorized Third World literatures as enunciations of the national, reserving the moment of emancipatory critique too easily for diasporic, exilic, immigrant, or postcolonial literatures produced in the West, with the underlying assumption that exposure to the West, through a Western language, literary tradition, or audience, is a precondition for critique. Concomitantly, latent in this “modernist conception of exile as a privileged state of consciousness” is the belief that a critique of the national is only possible outside the Third World nation-state (Giles 31). Jale Parla's and Nergis Ertürk's articles illustrate that many of the writers who felt not at home were indeed at home and in Turkey did not leave home to voice their critique of or reluctance to participate in linguistic engineering.