World Literature Bigger Than Five

Abstract

This paper examines the history, political background, and literary aesthetics of Turkey’s newly inaugurated Necip Fazıl Cultural Prize and the Istanbul Publishing Fellowship Program to examine how the Turkish government instrumentalizes literature to contest Turkish cultural values and identity. Describing the current need to advance Turkish culture and literature as “important a matter of survival as the fight against terror,” Erdoğan has increasingly emphasized cultural power in recent years as a means of cultivating and promoting his regime’s local and pious version of Turkishness. This paper explores how literary prizes and publishing programs partake in the formation of Turkish cultural power and investigates the ramifications of these government-sponsored initiatives for scholarly understanding of the relationship between world-building, the circulation of aesthetic practices underpinned by nationalism and religion, and the projection of national power on a global stage.