Читать книгу - "Нации и этничность в гуманитарных науках. Этнические, протонациональные и национальные нарративы. Формирование и репрезентация - С. Федоров"

Ş. Başlı

Transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a modern nation-state during the late XIX and early XX centuries refers to a long-debated process. Clarified by the motto of creating 'a unified mass with no privileges and social classes’^[282]; the official Republican modernization policy stresses uniformity of the young 'nation’ as opposed to the multi-ethnic and multi-religious structure of the imperial society. This motto embraces the nationhood as the main constituent ofidentity at the expense of obliterating the legacy of Ottoman modernization process. It labels the 'nationhood’ as the source of modernization; and implies the existence of a realm outside 'modernity’ to absorb ethnicity; gender, religion and tradition. Rather than conceiving the identity formation as a process of ongoing (re) establishment; the 'modern’ national identity basically grounds itself upon three discursive mechanisms: first; the acknowledgement of the analogy between the political and literary histories of Ottoman-Turkish modernization; secondly; the establishment of the myth of'progress’ and 'development’; and its representation through literary production and criticism; and thirdly; the periodization of literary history in accordance with its political counterpart and dissemination of specific imagery about the very act of literary production.

The historical narrative of XIX century Ottoman society is centered on the political modernization of the empire^[283]; and on the analogy between the political reforms of modernization and the transformation of classical Ottoman literature (Divan). The emergence of new literary forms and genres and new aesthetic debates; therefore; seem to be the direct consequences of Empire’s political exposure to the Western influence. The main reason for this analogy was the fact that individual novels such as Akabis Story^[284], Felátun Bey and Rakim Efendi^[285], The Awakening^[286], The Carriage Affair^[287], The Fresh or The Kosher?^[288] mostly dealt with various aspects and many socio-cultural ambiguities of modernization process. The literary history of the birth of the Ottoman novel is supported by the common assumption that the Ottoman intellectuals highlighted the question of what is the proper model for modernization’ in addition to the identity crises resulted from the wide-ranging transformation of the Ottoman society^[289]. XIX century– reforms and modernization movement, which came to the fore by the declaration of the Firman^[290], exploited the literary field as the basic domain for consolidating paradigm of'modernity’ in the XIX century Ottoman context. Accordingly, modernization was a transition from one particular 'circle of civilization’^[291] to the other, namely from the Eastern to the Western, and these two 'circles’ were mutually exclusive, monolithic entities.

The visible influence of Cartesian dualism in the concept of modernity introduced a specific historical narrative and a certain mode of representing political identities. The former depends on attributing symbolic value to literature as the latter cultivates different binary oppositions like East-West, traditional-modern, old-new, Ottoman-Europe and Ottoman-Turkish Republican. Namik Kemal’s famous criticism in 'Introduction to Celaleddin Harzemshah’^[292] to distinguish clearly the 'old’/’traditional’ literature from the 'new’/’modern’ is the essential foundation of conceiving ‘old’ and new' as mutually exclusive entities and of creating a hierarchy between them. He paves the way for opposing Ottoman classical and ‘realist’ literatures against each other on the basis of their aesthetic value. The definition of‘realism’ and positioning Ottoman classical and ‘new’ literatures against each other, therefore, gain prominence from the point of representing political identities in addition to depicting concrete images of the ‘proper against the ‘super modernization models^[293]. The duality of figurative narrative structure of Ottoman classical poetry as opposed to the European realism’s literal narrative has a central role in the identification of binary oppositions.