Sakr, Rita
(2011)
Between Terror and Taboo:
Monumentalisation as the Matrix of
History and Politics in Orhan
Pamuk’s The Black Book and Snow.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 38 (2).
pp. 227-247.
ISSN 1353-0194
Abstract
This essay explores monumentalisation as an idea and a practice that
function as the matrix of history and politics in Orhan Pamuk’s novels The Black
Book and Snow. I examine the politics of Pamuk’s negotiation of
‘monumentalisation’ in the two novels through its different textual trajectories:
the surreal image of the apocalyptic agency of Ataturk statues in Turkish space and
history; the elliptical and marginal representation of a centrally significant event in
a tabooed monumental space, as in the instances of a carnivalesque performance
around an Ataturk statue and of Kurdish attacks against these statues; and the
textual monumentalisation of Armenian architectural remains that bear the traces
of past violence. The main argument and conclusion are that Pamuk’s imaginative
rendering of monumental space allows a rethinking of the significance of
monumentalisation on theoretical and material levels specifically with respect to its
relations to various manifestations of terror and taboo in twentieth-century Turkey.
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