12 This would be equivalent to reading with emphasis on the “illusion of denotation and referentiality,” the semantics of sign-referent relations, in Harry Berger’s understanding (62, 103).
13 Ideally, one should be able to analyze “the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context” (Alcoff 26), which inevitably becomes a political arena. Regrettably, this goes beyond what we can offer at present, both for literary works from earlier periods and for those of our time.
14 http://english.republika.mk/ayfer-tunc-turkish-writer-i-dont-write-to-be-on-a-best-selling-list/, removed by Feb. 2019.
15 In a WhatsApp message to Mine Krause, Tunç underlines a similar aspect, saying that she is not addressing any specific readership at all, but simply writing from the perspective of a Turkish writer and, while doing so, not thinking of a potential Western reader who generally expects ethnic, neo-orientalist novels from countries like hers. In a short story, “Mikail’s Heart Stopped,” Tunç describes a district which in the past has welcomed the main female character “to its festering bosom in her times of poverty when she had lived through thousands of heartaches and humiliation,” characterized by “the smell of blood that flowed from the broken noses of women beaten every night, and the echo of the violence of strong against weak shown without demur as something very normal.” In the story’s setting, “even a little slip of the foot would flatten one’s honour in a trice.” The vivid narrative evokes ruined lives. But the point is that it does not necessarily evoke a chasm between its setting and Western conditions.
16 Orhan Pamuk reaches more readers outside of Turkey than inside the country: “My readers inside of Turkey and outside of Turkey are […] women and students who like to read novels, and ‘intellectuals’ who want to be updated on the scene. […] But that may be less true outside of Turkey. Ninety-five percent of men over 35 don’t read novels in my part of the world” (http://www.caroldbecker.com/sitepages/interviews/interviews_by/orhan-pamuk.html).
17 Khan and Afsar, for instance, use this figuration (426), a replay of Dabashi’s earlier lambasting of Azar Nafisi; apart from Hosseini, Orhan Pamuk (as reported in Göknar 23), Yasmina Khadra, and Elif Shafak have been scripted into the role. It misapplies Gayatri Spivak’s theorizing of a figure, building on Edward Said’s concepts, who is “a blank, though generative of a text of cultural identity that only the West (or a Western-model discipline) could inscribe,” a “self-marginalizing or self-consolidating migrant” including the native subaltern female, needed and foreclosed by the “European” who is “the human norm” (Critique 6). The native informant’s data are “to be interpreted by the knowing subject for reading” (Critique 49). A related category is “comprador intelligentsia” (Appiah, “Postcolonial” 119).
18 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/24/fiction.voicesofprotest.
19 An artist’s thematizing of depraved conditions in her/his own country may be assessed differently according to positionality: a Western writer at home in what may appear to be a hegemonic environment does not need to negotiate cultural and commercial expectations with a foreign publisher (and sometimes a foreign language), as Shafak, Tunç, and Haddad (among others) explain.
20 Khan and Qureshi contend that, while Hosseini shows some Pashtun men to be “constructive-minded” and “matchlessly helpful to the needy,” he “exaggerates in misrepresenting” the Taliban as in the character of Rasheed so that, because the novel is narrated “from female perspective,” it is “biased” and “discriminatory” (392, 395, 396, 397). In such a reading, Hosseini’s work does not reveal representative conditions; the critics might be more pleased with a novel that shows the Taliban and their male adherents opposing any form of violence or discrimination against women. Further attacks of this kind on Hosseini’s work can easily be found (see also our chapter 1.1.2.). Yet Sarah O’Brien from a very different reading sees in Hosseini’s fiction “a sometimes problematic subversion of post-9/11 New Orientalist stereotypes” (4).
21 Tahira Khan places “the prescribed socio-cultural norms” first: a lower-class and economically dispossessed man retains honor as long as “the women in his family remain in his control”; honor-related violence occurs, too, in upper classes, with “more ‘sophisticated’ and modern” weapons (66).
22 Writing for “Dutch, Belgian, European readers” (Braun), Abdolah sums up his intentions by stating that he is specifically addressing “my Dutch, Belgian, German and American readers, since it would not even have been necessary for an Iranian audience. I take my readers by the hand and let them peek behind the curtain” (Braun).
23 Tahar Ben Jelloun, too, has been the target of scathing attacks, as we will discuss further below (see chapter 1.1.3.).
24 There are further aspects to the debate about Mo Yan: Xue Wei discusses the writer in the context of Western promotion of authors who “criticize the Chinese government,” quoting the Nobel chairman’s award ceremony speech (109). From another perspective, Duran and Huang highlight the “sustained crosscultural gazes” on Mo Yan, which result in enabling the “instantiation of a brave, significant, critical, communally constructed connection of East and West” (15–16).
25 Elif Shafak explains in an interview with Le magazine littéraire, “Fiction for me does not mean telling my own story to other people. Just the opposite. It means putting myself in the shoes of others, making endless journeys to other people’s realities and dreams. In fiction it is essential to transcend the limits of Self. […] Sometimes I think I am full of multiple voices.” As for Shafak’s work, we can read it as exposing a fallacy within the “real”: she partly adapts to but also counters “the dominant discourses in Turkey as well as in the western world, and offers changeable perspectives to confront on the one side the hedonist and consumer reality in which many Western European readers are living today, and on the other side the polarised, patriarchal and nationalist reality in Turkey” (Heynders 164). In this way Shafak’s fiction, its “[n];arrative articulation and representation help to imagine and understand social ‘events’,” to prompt “intercultural consciousness” (Heynders 179). It is also useful to