Center-periphery dialectic in the Turkish novel

The center-periphery paradigm has been the dominant epistemological backbone of academic studies of Turkish political life. The center-periphery paradigm, a gift of Edward Shils to the world of social sciences, was first adapted to Ottoman-Turkish political life by Serif Mardin in his article "Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?" and has been at the heart of heated debates ever since. The present study aimed to adapt the center-periphery paradigm to forty texts selected with methodological delicacy from among the Turkish novels written in the period from 1950 to the present. The chosen texts are characterized by the dialectical oscillations between the center of the state and the peripheral areas/entities, which have, as the phrase is, devoured the dust of Turkish political life, and constructed the historical, sociological, and political anatomy of the Turkish novel in this direction by taking into account the aforementioned debates and by employing the historical/sociological, philosophical analyses of researchers such as Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Mann, Gilles Deleuze, Fèlix Guattari, Linda Hutcheon, etc. who have directly or indirectly studied within the boundaries of this paradigm, which can repair the epistemological deficiencies in the aforementioned paradigm, that is, by resorting to a kind of theoretical pragmatism and expanding it with various theories. The study essentially consisted of three sections: The first section included a broad theoretical analysis of the center-periphery paradigm based on the views of the researchers whose names are mentioned in the paragraph above; the second section employed this analysis to analyze the center-periphery relations in the Ottoman-Turkish political life and finally to establish an epistemological framework. The main/last part of the study traced the center-periphery dialectic in Turkish novels written after 1950 under sub-headings based on the notions of place, subject, ethnic identities, militarism, village/town, working class, sexuality, and body.