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Metis Nonfiction
Cultural Criticism
a proposed edition of essays
from two books:
Vitrinde Yaşamak (1992)
Kötü Çocuk Türk (2001)
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Download high resolution copy
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About the Author
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One of the foremost cultural critics in Turkey, Nurdan Gürbilek is the author of
Vitrinde Yaşamak (Life in the Shopwindow, 1992), an analysis of the cultural
dynamics of the 1980s in Turkey. Her other publications include Yer Değiştiren Gölge
(Shifting Shadow, 1995) and Ev Ödevi (Homework, 1999), collection of essays
on modern Turkish writers. She is also the author of Kötü Çocuk Türk (Bad
Boy Turk, 2001), an analysis of some of the significant images and tropes in modern
Turkish literature and popular culture. In her last book
Kör Ayna, Kayıp Şark (Orient Lost, 2004) Gürbilek explores the sexual
anxieties accompanying the Ottoman-Turkish literary modernization. Nurdan Gürbilek
also edited, translated and introduced Son Bakışta Aşk (Love at Last Sight,
1993), a collection of essays in Turkish by Walter Benjamin. She is currently working
on a book on Dostoyevsky’s "underground tragedy" and its counterparts in modern
Turkish literature.
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Other Books from Metis
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Vitrinde Yaşamak (Life in the Shopwindow), 1992
Yer Değiştiren Gölge (Shifting Shadow), 1995
Ev Ödevi (Homework), 1999
Kör Ayna,
Kayıp Şark (Orient Lost), 2004
(Orient Lost), 2004
Mağdurun
Dili (Language of the Downtrodden), 2008
(Language of the Downtrodden), 2008
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Nurdan Gürbilek
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Child of Agony
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Cultural Climate of Turkey
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Vitrinde Yaşamak (1992), Kötü Çocuk Türk (2001)
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Contents
Reviews
Excerpt
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A collection of essays on Turkey’s cultural climate in the last decades from a most
insightful literary and cultural critic. The first two essays of this collection,
"Life in the Shop Window" and "Return of the Repressed", attend to the 80’s – a
period of radical economic, political and cultural change following the coup d’état
of 1980. Nurdan Gürbilek argues that this was not only a period of oppression of
speech but also a period of explosion of speech; an incitement to speech. A period
when two seemingly opposed cultural strategies, the old one of repression, forbiddance
and annihilation and the new one of provocation, assimilation and incorporation
came together, weaving a cultural fabric that had significant results in shaping
the cultural climate of modern Turkey. Gürbilek also argues that this was a period
of cultural pluralism – a result of the collapse of the modern Kemalist identity.
Years of the "return of the repressed"; the voices that were previously repressed
by the Kemalist project of modernization, the voices of the Islamic and Kurdish
opposition, those of the lower and peripheral cultures, of women and queers and
also the discourses of desire and sexuality returned to a relatively liberal cultural
market ready to incorporate rather than suppress.
The following essays on Turkishness and
evil explore the rather sinister cultural climate of the 1990’s and 2000’s when
the efforts to redefine the Turkish identity predominated the cultural scene. She
takes as her point of departure some of the significant images and tropes in modern
Turkish literature and popular culture: popular arabesque songs of the 70s and 80s,
the figure of the snob in modern Turkish literature, a news article on the death
of a porn star, an oddly popular poster illustration, the child hero archetype in
urban popular culture… With utmost care and justice Gürbilek weaves these into a
keen understanding of their political, social and cultural significance, exploring
Turkishness not as an autonomous and essentialist local truth but rather as an impasse
always already shaped in relation to the modern world, as a double-bind that has
always produced oppositional sentiments in the cultural sphere. This is where the
desire to be the other coincides with the fear of losing one’s self in the other,
where xenophilia is simultaneous with xenophobia, and the feeling of inadequacy
is concurrent with a reflex of self-defense. And evil here has to do with the unleashing
of all things dark and sinister when the liberal promise fails to deliver, when
the shop windows cease to dazzle and the struggle for livelihood turns bitter in
urban wilderness. Where do "Turkishness" and "evil" converge? And how do we gain
insight into these moments of convergence?
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Introduction
Life in the Shop Window
Return of the Repressed
Death of a Stranger
Child of Agony
Bad Boy Turk I
Bad Boy Turk II
Dandies and Originals
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Nuh Köklü, Radikal Kitap Eki, 23 November 2001
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"Gürbilek experiments with a ‘close reading’ of Turkishness. She offers a new route
in a world that is often overlooked, ignored, hence misread due to all the prejudices
that infiltrate the reflections on being Turkish. Amongst all other road maps drawn
for this terrain, the one that she offers is different not because it claims to
be the correct route, but rather because it takes into account all that we come
across on the way."
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Mahmut Temizyürek, Türkiye'de Eleştiri ve Deneme, TÖMER Yayınları, 2002
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"The fundamental concern and aim of these essays is to reveal the Turkish cultural
identity along with the formations that shape that identity and the current day,
to elucidate with examples what moves that identity, what hurts it, what brings
it to tears, but also what it desires, what it excludes and when, what it is pampered
with, and what infuriates it."
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from "Life in the Shopwindow"
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The decade following the coup d’état of 1980 was one of the most repressive periods
in modern Turkish history in terms of its political, institutional and human consequences;
it was a period of severe official oppression and prohibition. But contradictorily,
it was also a period of radical cultural change which the word "repression" alone
is unable to account for – a period which signaled the birth of a rather new cultural
strategy; a more positive, liberal and modern regime of power which seeks to transform
rather than forbid, to incorporate rather than annihilate, to provoke rather than
suppress. The juxtaposition of these seemingly opposed strategies –the old one of
repression, silencing of speech, and the new one of excessive verbalization, an
"explosion of speech"– yielded a peculiar cultural climate of contradictions. Political
oppression and glittering shopwindows, systematized torture by the police and insistence
on a much celebrated individuation, military repression of the Kurdish guerillas
and the rise of "peripheral" culture, prohibition of speech and a highly provoked
appetite for it, barrenness of cultural standardization and the diversity of cultural
pluralism all shared the same scene in the 80’s...
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