Occidentalism, hybridity and acculturation in Enchantress of Florence and the White Castle

The purpose of this study is to identify the discourse of Occidentalism with its social and artistic aspects within the works of Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk. Enchantress of Florence and The White Castle constitute the focus of the study. The discourse of Occidentalism with its various implications has been traced in these works. Here, it is proposed that the binary oppositions in the novels, such as master-slave, East-West, science-religion are shown to be hollow due to the contingency of cultural borders which are thought to be existing between Europe and Asia. Furthermore, such oppositions are destined to cancel them out because of the ambiguous nature of the Occidentalism discourse that simultaneously contests and celebrates the Western culture. After a postcolonial analysis of the two novels in the context of Occidentalist imagery and characterization, hybridity of the discourse and its reflections in representations of the West in the novels are discussed. Finally, acculturation as a personal/cultural process of becoming different and as signifying the end of fixity in terms of cultural representations is defined in relation to Occidentalism in general and to these two novels in particular. Keywords: Occidentalism, hybridity, acculturation, cultural difference, representation, Westernism, novel, discourse, identity.