The ‘Underground’ Reception of the Beats in Turkey

Abstract

This article examines how Beat texts are received in Turkey as underground literature and what that reception reveals not only about the possibilities for cultural dissent in Turkey, but the extent to which the Beats are still capable of promoting social change in general. While translations of Beat Generation texts are a fairly recent phenomenon in Turkey, the internet has provided them with additional exposure, with the result that Beat texts play a role in discussions of the growing genre of underground literature in Turkey. This study analyses that role in order to discuss questions of commodification, transgression, censorship, and cultural difference that impact Beat texts in Turkey. Beat writers offer a form of resistance that allows Turkish readers to challenge mainstream values and mount legal challenges through the classic figure of the Beat rebel. This unique situation provides insight not only into the possibilities in culturally translating an imported counterculture, but also provides a refracted view of the assumptions operating in that countercultural model as it is redeployed in a different nation at a different moment of history.