Published Paper Details:

Abstract This article applies Homi K. Bhabha's postcolonial theory, as elaborated in The Location of Culture (1994), to Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow (2002; trans. Maureen Freely, 2004). It argues that the novel dramatises three of Bhabha's central concepts -- mimicry, the Third Space, and the unhomely -- with unusual fidelity and complexity. Ka, the Turkish poet who returns from twelve years of exile in Germany to the snowbound border city of Kars, is read as a version of Bhabha's mimic man: an intellectual whose identity is constituted in the ambivalent, interstitial space between European modernity and Turkish cultural formation. The National Theatre -- where Sunay Zaim's theatrical coup becomes actual political violence -- is read as a Third Space in Bhabha's sense: a site where the boundary between the performed and the real, the secular and the sacred, is perpetually contested and never resolved. The novel's treatment of Turkish nationhood is further read through Bhabha's concept of DissemiNation: the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population in a double-time of pedagogical authority and performative disruption. The article argues that Pamuk's novel, set in a forgotten Anatolian city during an engineered political crisis, maps with striking precision the structural conditions that Bhabha identifies as constitutive of postcolonial cultural ambivalence.