History as Antidote to Wounded National Pride: Politics of History in Kemal Tahir’s Devlet Ana

What is it about?

This paper analyzes Kemal Tahir’s novel Devlet Ana within the scope of the politics of history. Through the analysis of Tahir’s novel and in line with Hayden White’s idea of history as a “narrative discourse” that is more imagined by social, political, and historical actors than simply found, I attempt to reveal the political and ideological forces that brought about a_x000D_ reactionary, monolithic, and totalising understanding of history and history writing in Tahir and Turkish literarature. Behind all attempts to create a documentary verisimilitude that describe history or a given historical stage as it really was, behind all claims to accuracy, rationality, and historical truth, the paper shows that there is a profound nationalist desire for power. Driven and controlled by an inferiority complex and Western-phobia, despite his allegedly Marxist framing, the paper argues, Tahir’s understanding of history hardly goes beyond an ethical binarism in which absolute good/evil racial and civilisational_x000D_ nature determines all.

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