Le coût de l’orientalisme

Résumé 0

Edward Said’s seminal work on Orientalism has shown to what extent this ideology has formed and dominated Western perceptions of the non-Western world. What is less known, or more easily forgotten, is that the power of Orientalism rests in its capacity to infiltrate and contaminate non-Western societies, particularly among their elites, by creating derivative and localized forms of Orientalism, targeting certain sectors of the population. Turkey is a case in point, where Ottoman and later Turkish Orientalism has often been embedded in the process of modernization and Westernization, pitting the ‘progressist’ elites against the ‘conservative’ masses in a self-proclaimed ‘civilizing mission’. Focusing on the dichotomy between alla turca and alla franca, the article explores how this phenomenon came into being from late Ottoman times up to the heyday of Kemalist modernity, and how it may have been responsible for one of the most powerful fault lines of Turkish society, explaining some of the most recent developments in Turkish politics.