Session 1: Representations
Session 1: Representations
Chair: Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Rethinking Western Colonial Touristic Representations of the “Exotic Other”
Ranjan Bandyopadhyay
Department of Hospitality, Recreation & Tourism Management, San Jose State University, San Jose, California, USA
Western media has been criticized for representing Third World destinations and communities as untouched, unspoiled, paradisiacal, and stagnant (Britton, 1979; Cohen, 1993; Hutt, 1996). Recently, several scholars have commented that Western representations of India and Indians as timeless and primitive are embedded with a colonial discourse, the affinity of which is towards the establishment of a dominated space (Foucault, 1986). One author clarified that these stereotypes are an inherent aspect of American society, transmitting a mélange of inaccurate clichés from one generation to another. Obviously, what can provide Western tourists for their “mythical Utopias” than India? These hegemonic representations have frequently catalogued stories on bizarre customs, poverty, and cast the white American as the hero in a savaged land (Cecil, Pranav & Takacs, 1994) thus, reinforcing the conception that India should always be poor. As Pratt (1992) so eloquently opined that literary traditions shape the status of travel writers, and, as a result, the construction of class and racial prejudices in describing the “Other” still dominates in contemporary American travel writing. Scholars have well documented how Western media constructs Third World destinations as “Other” to create a voyeuristic gaze for Western tourists. However, few authors have studied how these “Others” feel about their Western representations. To attend to this significant lacuna, this ethnographic study explored how Goa (most popular tourist destination of India) is represented by the Western media, and if the local people of Goa accept these representations or want to countervail with representations of their own. The results revealed that the local people of Goa resist the Western stereotypes by formalizing self representations of their own culture. Thus, this study reaffirms and forwards the paradigm shift that’s happening from Eurocentric tourism studies literature of ‘us’ studying ‘them’ – the “Exotic Other.”
Framing the East: Cultural Representation in Contemporary Turkish Product Design
Bahar Emgin
?zmir University of Economics, Faculty of Fine Arts and Design, ?zmir, Turkey
With the impact of globalization, national industrial design styles have emerged focusing on history and tradition as a source of innovation and differentiation in the global market. Designers once directed towards future and progress focusing on rationality and functionality are now attentive to issues of culture and tradition.
In this context, generating a Turkish design style has recently been on Turkish designers’ and industry’s agenda in order to attain and sustain international market success. While numerous exhibitions and fairs are organized to promote Turkish design both in Turkey and abroad, a Turkish design discourse prevailed in well-known design magazines of Turkey. As a result of this inclination, Turkish design style has been defined as a meeting place of two cultures – East and West – focusing on the value of differentiation.
As an apparent methodology, elements from Turkish culture and tradition (water pipe, tulip-shaped tea glass, Ottoman motifs and symbols, Islamic elements, and etc.) are extracted and adapted to modern production methods and aesthetic understanding in the name of modernization or westernization. These new elements address the questions of identity, hybridity, differentiation and transculturation as well as the oppositions like Orient / Occident or East / West. The focus of this paper is on contemporary Turkish design products with special emphasis on the tea glass named “eastmeetswest” by Erdem Akan, in order to explore the relationship that is constructed between East and West in contemporary Turkish design style.
This is Not Your Home, or the Return of the Exiled: Cosmopolitan Nostalgia and The Impossibility of Representation in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow
Laura Ceia-Minjares
Department of Romance, German and Russian Languages and Literatures, California State University, California, USA
“If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.”
“But no one believes in what they read in a novel” I said.
“Oh, yes, they do,” he cried. “If only to think themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and love us. But if you put in what I’ve just said, at lest your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.”
Orhan Pamuk, Snow
As of late, writer Orhan Pamuk has entered the arena of Western notoriety as a dissident to the nationalist proclivities of the Turkish state; more precisely, he was one of the first intellectual figures in contemporary Turkey to denounce the Armenian genocide—one of the knotty, lingering legacies of the Ottoman Empire. While Pamuk is not an overtly political author (with the exception of Snow), he is nevertheless haunted by the specter of history. In his works, Turkey and Istanbul in particular, are seen as focal sites where the remnants of the imperial past collide with the modernizing efforts of Atatürk, and the ever-present imperatives of Western consumerist culture. The protagonists of Pamuk’s books are strollers of Istanbul —a bridge over the troubled frontier waters of the Bosporus. They map a concrete topography of waste, ruin, and faded glory, as well as ethnic mixing and cohabitation, repressed or unrepentant colonial nostalgia and desires, and distressing identity assessments.
The site of Snow however, is a former imperial border town, Kars, at the crossroads of two extinct empires (Ottoman and Russian), a site of conflict between republican, radical Islamist, and Kurdish separatist forces. The protagonist, Ka, a former political exile returning “home” for personal reasons becomes invested with the task of representing this place. The complexity of the situation gives birth to a polyphonic novel that voices concerns, fears, half-hearted hopes, and idealistic thoughts regarding the future of Turkey within the European and Islamic context.
Using theoretical notions of the “spectral” developed by Freud, Foucault, Bhabha and Derrida, as well as contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism, this paper examines the multilayered nature of Kars topography, and the complex identity issues that it engenders with regards to religion, history, gender, and geo-political qualms and allegiances. My essay also focuses on Ka’s identity as a double exile: from Turkey, as well as from his current place of adoption—Frankfurt. Although posing as a journalist, Ka’s secret quest, I argue, is that for the lost Turkey of his childhood, a mental space free of conflict, and infused by the nostalgic memory of the cosmopolitan wholeness of the Ottoman Empire. On the one hand, I contend, Ka’s liminal status of living in-between cultures ostensibly makes him an ideal narrative instrument for exploring the peculiarities of the two, as it seems theoretically possible for him to assume or dispose of the prerogatives of his Turkish identity almost at will. However, this liminality—far from eliciting a celebratory position on either side—will prove precisely to be the source of his condemnation. As one who has experienced the values of the West, his existential parameters have been forever modified. Thus, his attempts at navigating the socio-cultural and political turbulences of this corner of the country he left behind make him an intruder, despite his constant efforts to reintegrate. As an outsider trying to penetrate the mysteries and cultural taboos of this former imperial space, Ka not only disturbs the fragile equilibrium of Kars, but his endeavors at representing this space—poetically or journalistically—will prove impossible.
This paper aims to the particular intricacies of Turkish identities and allegiances as described by Pamuk, especially in the midst of a tense international climate bearing imperative questions about the role and place of Islam and Turkey in modern times and within the Western world.
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