Writing "the other": a comparative analysis of the narrative representations of Kurdishness in late and early republican novels

Abstract

This thesis is about tracing the continuities and ruptures of prevailing tropes in the representations of Kurdishness in early and late Republican period novels. In order to pursue this goal, two novels from each period which would enable to follow the main tropes of representation employed to elaborate the problems deriving from the East and Kurdishness are chosen. These tropes also point towards their authors’ attempt to think through and resolve the Eastern and Kurdish question’s challenges to the Republican project aiming at modernization and national unity. Following the analysis of these for novels, throughout the thesis, I argue that 1) representations of Kurdishness through mechanisms of othering points towards an orientalist stance. 2) This orientalist stance bears a gendered essence. 3) In an attempt to elaborate the Kurdish-Eastern Question, which is located at the very core of the Republican project these novels also elaborate on the position of the Turkish elite, who is imagined to be in a definitive relation to this Kurdishness and the East. 4) This relationality and mutual construction of Kurdishness/ the East and Turkishness/ the West also signifies how the whereabouts of the Republican project is imagined. Designation of the narrative plots and of the possibility of narrative resolution/closure also point towards their authors’ state of belief in the Republican project as an essentially modernist one, that sets its primary goal as saving its subjects through transforming them into members of the unified, modern nation.