After the Night, Before the Gate: Kafkaesque Imaginations and Dystopian Speculations in the Mediterranean

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article attempts a critical conversation between Kafka’s Der Prozess (posthumously published in 1925, translated into English as The Trial in 1937) and two novels from the Mediterranean Basin. The Turkish author Bilge Karasu’s Gece (1985, translated into English as Night by Güneli Gün in 1994) responds to the national conflicts intensified by the military coup in Türkiye (Turkey) in the 1980s with its dark portrayal of political conspiracies and unhinged violence. Almost thirty years later, Aziz conveys a similar sense of social chaos and political disillusionment: her novel Al-Ṭābūr (2013, translated into English as The Queue by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2016) addresses the aftermath of the 2011 Egypt uprising. In addition to the social critique that shapes the dystopian allegories of the novels, Kayışcı Akkoyun examines the discursive conflicts and gaps through which Kafka, Karasu, and Aziz expose the constructed nature of oppressive structures and the arbitrariness of authority. She argues that the disjointed dystopian narratives of Kafka, Karasu, and Aziz not only portray the horrors witnessed at a particular place and time but also share a common utopian vision that extends to the future through the authors’ imaginative struggle against totalizing forces of uneven modernization.