Subversion of Orientalist Ethos in My Name is Red

Abstract

This thesis contends that Pamuk’s dramatizes the complicated coexistence of diverse components of postcolonial identity. This type of complication ultimately challenges the fixity of identity claims and points towards a shift in attitude which remains skeptical of the West as a normative site. In this sense, Pamuk’ s postcolonial line of representation of the East-West encounter in comes out as a response to orientalist constructions. Postcolonial theory, in this sense, promotes a revisionary viewpoint. It aspires to amend the discriminative judgments of the West in its portrayal of the East. And it aims to take a liberatory position from the formulaic ways of seeing otherness by creating an alternative space for the native from which he or she can be heard. The thesis makes the point that Pamuk’s demonstrates the shortcomings of Euro-centric representation of the “other” as he portrays the East with all its heterogeneity which resists the orientalist attempts of stabilizing Eastern identity. Pamuk suggests that the present cannot be understood without a strong understanding of the past, and that the past cannot be separated from geography.