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Occidentalism:
The Historical Fantasy of the Modern
A place on the
map is also a place in history.
Adrienne Rich,
‘‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’’
One who goes
too far East,
Because of
geography arrives in the West,
The reverse is
also true.
Ece Ayhan,
Yort Savul
I offer the
term Occidentalism to conceptualize how the West figures in the
temporal/spatial imagining of modern Turkish national identity. From its
initial conception in the process of defining the Turkish national identity in
the late nineteenth century to this day, ‘‘the West’’ has been contrasted to
‘‘the East’’ in a continuous negotiation between the two constructs. ‘‘The
West’’ has either been celebrated as a “model” to be followed or exorcised as a
threat to ‘‘indigenous’’ national values. I argue that in theorizing the
construction and representation of Turkish modernity, we can neither
unproblematically herald the Western model nor dismiss the fantasy of ‘‘the
West’’ that informs the hegemonic national imaginary. Turkey, which has been
labeled by both outsiders and insiders as a bridge between the East and the
West, has an ambivalent relation not only to the geographical sites of the East
and the West, but also to their temporal signification: namely, backwardness
and progress. Turkey has been trying to cross the bridge between the East and
the West for more than a hundred years now, with a selfconscious anxiety that
it is arrested in time and space by the bridge itself. In other words, the
meaning of the present has a mythical core that has persisted over years and
which remains as a source of frustration and threat, and as a symptom of
internalized inferiority
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