Between Orient and Occident: The Construction of a Postimperial Turkish Identity in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Novel Huzur

Abstract

This article aims to show that imagology is a promising method for analysing images of the European Other and the Turkish Self as expressed in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s novel Huzur (1948; trans. A Mind at Peace, 2007). The narrative challenges the rhetoric of early Turkish nationalism by promoting a synthesis of the national present with both the melancholically evoked Ottoman heritage and with European cultures. At the same time, the novel’s protagonists stand for diverse and often contradicting conceptions of Self and Other and thus provide an insight into the various identity conflicts present in Republican Turkey.