The postsecular imaginaries of Orhan Pamuk's novels

This article argues that Orhan Pamuk's literary innovations bring formations of religion and secularism separated by ideologies of Turkish modernization and cultural revolution into productive parity. Pamuk's depictions of the Ottoman Islamic past and its legacies - including its material culture, everyday practices, and Sufism - articulate mystical and religious tropes along with the material and secular culture of the nation-state. His eleven novels published between 1982 and 2022 dramatize what I term Turkish "postsecular imaginaries,"in which cultural representations and practices of religion and state are increasingly reinterpreted as being synchronic, interrelated, and imbricated. These manifestations of postsecularism inform both contemporary Turkish literary modernity and the conditions of a debated Turkish postcoloniality, which interrogates sites of European, Ottoman, and Turkish Republican state power.

Duke Scholars

Author Erdag Göknar Asian & Middle Eastern Studies