Disoriented in Istanbul: A Reading of Its Fogscapes Across the Twentieth Century

Abstract

ABSTRACTIstanbul's discursive positioning as a city of cultural ambiguity offers a productive way of approaching disorientation conceptually: the image of the city reveals a struggle to orient itself amidst and across discourses of Orientalism and modernity. Within that struggle, the city's metaphorical fogs, from the prototypical representation of the city's fogs by the modernist poet Tevfik Fikret to Prince Abdülmecid's eponymous painting, from the Republican writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's transmutative dream to the melancholy mists of Orhan Pamuk, constitute an unlikely guide to its exceptional experience of disorientation. The city constantly changes and various forms of literary or figurative fog accompany experiences of disorientation especially during the fraught transition between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, where the discourses of modernity and Orientalism coalesce and disorient one another. Each instance of fog/mist discloses something about the struggle to orient the city, as well as the struggle with ‘the Orient’.