Identity Politics in My Name Is Red

• Main Authors: Tsai-Hua Yang, 楊采樺
• Other Authors: Mei-Hwa Sung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/81972224265729468198

博士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系博士班 === 100 === This dissertation aims to examine in-betweenness in the process of Turkish identity-formation. A fictional murder mystery set in sixteenth century Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red is a narrative not only about an investigation into the murderer’s identity but also Turkish self-awareness. Although the perpetrator is definitively revealed at the end of the story, Turkish identity remains fluid and changeable in the liminal space between the self and the Other, as well as the Islamic world and that of Western Europe. As a result, it proves to be as multi-faceted and ambiguous as the different definitions of “Red” in Islamic and European cultures. In this study, I spatialize Pamuk’s Turkish identity-formation in three overlapping dimensions, including the urban space, the narrative space, and the cultural space. Chapter One interprets how Turkish identity is inscribed into the spatial narratives of Istanbul. The place identity of Istanbulites is asserted in a space of liminality. The description of the native landscape is interwoven with non-native buildings and other elements such that Turkish identity is formed in the cross-cultural space in-between the real landscape and the imagined framework of social and historical spatiality. Chapter Two focuses on Turkish identity imprinted into the polyphonic narrative space created by the postmodern novel. Inserted by multiple narrators, the novel constructs a crossbred Turkish identity from diverse perspectives. And in combining the novel with other narrative genres in the context of this story, Turkish identity is revealed in the hybridized narrative. Chapter Three explores how Turkish identity is formed in cultural space. Instead of representing the relationship between Islamic and Western culture as a binary opposition, Pamuk’s novel perceives it as being in a dialectical debate with one another. Thus, in the unfolding of this narrative, Turkish identity can be characterized by its fluidity as it oscillates in-between the cultural differences, a notion developed more fully in Edward Said’s “Third Space.”