Semi-Peripheral Borderscapes: Latife Tekin’s Swords of Ice (2007) and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2005)

The final chapter explores the representation of borders in Tekin’s novel Swords of Ice and Pamuk’s Snow and argues that the semi-periphery can be productively understood as the border-space of the world-system. Through comparative analysis of the act of border crossing in both novels, the chapter proposes that the mobility of the protagonists serves a critical narrative function in mapping and translating the complex and uneven terrain of the border, whilst drawing attention to contradictions and tensions that define this space. The chapter opens with a discussion of Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labour by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, in which they suggest that because borders structure and regulate ‘labor, space, time, law, power, and citizenship’ (2013, p.7), they serve a powerful material and symbolic function within the capitalist system. By drawing attention to the productive power of borders, Mezzadra and Neilson reposition them as central to the construction of global space and suggest that the conflicts and contradictions of the capitalist system are played out particularly intensely in these spaces. The chapter then considers how Tekin and Pamuk represent the numerous and overlapping borders that congregate in the semi-periphery, drawing attention to the contradictions and tensions that define this space. The second part of the chapter focuses on the protagonists’ roles as mediators in the novels and draws on Stephen Shapiro’s suggestion that the semi-periphery plays a ‘communicative role’ (2008, p. 38) in the world-system. This addresses the importance of translation to the articulation of alternative ways of belonging in these marginal spaces, which exist in tension with the confines of the Turkish nation-state and the identity it prescribes. The final part of the chapter addresses how, as in Istanbul and Dear Shameless Death, both Pamuk and Tekin unsettle realist representation to produce a dialectical literary aesthetic, which further attests to ‘the pressures of combined and uneven development’ (WReC 2015, p. 62) in the semi-periphery. This creates a space for the formation of alternative forms of belonging, which exist simultaneously, but often in asynchronous relation to, the nation-state and national identity.