29 Postcolonialism will be used to enlighten this thesis in dealing with predicament
of the oscillation of the East and the West as well as in finding Pamuk’s solutions to the predicament of the oscillation in My Name is Red and The White Castle.
2.2.1. The Discourse on Postcolonialism
Here, I used postcolonial theory to deconstruct the complex and ambiguous desire to imitate the Other, which is mainly on the Turkish characters
in My Name is Red and The White Castle. In order to dismantle the complex and ambiguous desire to imitate the Other, Homi K Bhabha’s discourse on
postcolonialism will be employed in this research, which also focuses on hybridity, in-betweenness, mimicry, and ambivalence.
2.2.1.1. Colonialism
Although this study uses the discourse on Postcolonial theory from Homi Bhabha as the main reference, it will start with concept of colonialism. It is for the
reason that Turkey is one of the countries in Europe, which has never been colonialized by other nations or by Western powers. As a non-postcolonial
country, Turkey experiences a self-colonization as the result of brutal Westernization, which was “part of the ongoing project, associated with an elite
movement, to rapidly “civilize” society borrowed from the Soviet example and Europe.”
74
In addition, Europe is used by the elite as the main reference to “civilize” Turkey through imitating their values of modernity.
Ania Loomba defines colonialism as conquest, domination, and control of other people’s land and goods. It is the expansion of various European powers
74
Göknar, “Ottoman Theme”, 35.
30 into Asia, Africa, or Americas from the 16
th
century onwards.
75
While Ashis Nandy, in The Intimate Enemy 1983, which adapts Foucault’s analysis of power,
says that modern colonialism is a new way of colonialism in which the colonizer or the powerful changes its way in colonizing the Orient or the powerless.
76
Nandy builds an interesting distinction between two chronologically distinct types or genres of colonialism. The first focused on the physical conquest of territories,
whereas the second was more insidious in its commitment to the conquest and occupation of minds, selves, and cultures. The second was established by
rationalists, modernists, and liberals who argued that imperialism can bring civilization to the uncivilized world.
77
Furthermore, Nandy writes:
This colonialism colonises minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within colonised societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all. In the
process, it helps to generalise the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is more
everywhere, within the West and outside, in structures and in minds Nandy, 1983, p. xi.
78
Along with Nandy’s types of colonialism, Orhan Pamuk, in “The Paris Review Interview” also mentions that even though Turkey was never a colony but the
suppression that Turks suffered was self-inflicted. In that suppression, there is a sense of fragility but that self-imposed Westernization also brought isolation. As a
result, the Turks were strangely isolated from the Western world they rivalled.
79
Their desire to Westernize their country had created their commitment and ambition to the conquest of Turks own mind, selves, and culture. The Turks
75
Loomba, ColonialismPostcolonialism, 7-8.
76
Cited in Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, First Edition Crows Nest, Allen Unwin: 1998 15.
77
Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 15.
78
See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1983 xi.
79
Pamuk, Other Colours, 370-371.
31 argued that facing the West is “really the messianic harbinger of civilization to the
uncivilized world”.
80
In additional, to have Turkey civilized and modernized, they erased their history and left the Ottoman tradition. They felt that Islam and the
Ottoman tradition were their biggest obstacles in order to be the West and modern.
2.2.1.2. Postcolonialism
