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Entrenching geopolitical imaginations: brand(ing) Turkey through Orhan Pamuk

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Abstract

This study focuses on how through consumers, the market reproduces a discourse that aligns with the political and the cultural spheres. By drawing on fields of production and consumption, we turn to how both Turkey as a nation-brand and Orhan Pamuk as a cultural producer are produced and consumed at the nexus of political and cultural fields. Based on the analysis of data comprising of interviews with Orhan Pamuk and Amazon consumer reviews of his work, we argue that the consumers of Pamuk’s works duplicate and reiterate dualities that have come to represent Turkey. This highlights the role of cultural products as nation-brand makers and the markets as where arts and politics intersect. We suggest that cultural products serve as vehicles through which existing perceptions and real and perceived global political hierarchies are reproduced.

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Notes

  1. In 2005, Orhan Pamuk was the locus of a controversy when, during an interview with a Swiss newspaper, Pamuk stated that “a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in this country and I'm the only one who dares to talk about it.” Saying this was going against the “official” history of Turkey, which, immediately, turned Pamuk into an object of hate, resulting in court cases and death threats (Freely 2005).

  2. The Bosphorus Bridge was renamed the 15 July Martyr’s Bridge after the military coup attempt on July 15, 2016.

  3. The reviews and interviews were first read by each researcher independently to identify themes, and discussed with each other. In the next stage, they were read all together by both researchers, and the hermeneutic circle continued on until saturation point. As suggested by Thompson et al. (1989), inferences were based on the entire data set, which was based on iteration. Once final themes were agreed on, each review and interview was re-examined for the final write-up. The quotes used throughout the findings are particularly clear examples of patterns/themes found in our data.

  4. Unlike the work of Schroeder et al. (2015) who study the making of heritage brands by the local consumers, we are interested in the co-creation of a certain image of Turkey abroad largely by foreign consumers. Also, the number of reviews and interviews related to Pamuk’s earlier books outnumber the more recent ones as it takes a while for the recent novels to be translated into English and gain readership that will respond with a certain amount of reviews. Regardless of these, in order to be as current and comprehensive as possible, we tried to include the most recent interviews with Pamuk that were not posted on his personal website, via Google.

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  1. Birmingham Business School, University House, Edgbaston Park Road, Birmingham, B152TY, UK

    Cagri Yalkin

  2. Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Kadir Has University, Cibali/Fatih, 34083, Istanbul, Turkey

    Lerna K. Yanık

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Yalkin, C., Yanık, L.K. Entrenching geopolitical imaginations: brand(ing) Turkey through Orhan Pamuk. J Int Relat Dev 23, 339–358 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-018-0153-1

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