ثوب مو ثوبك يعتك

أهيسكا -تحاول تركيا عبور الجسر بين الشرق والغرب منذ أكثر من مائة عام مع علمها بالعلاقة المتناقضة على تلك المواقع الجغرافية مما خلق الدونية الداخلية للأتراك

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