Some time since I moved to the United States, my home country, Turkey, shifted its geographic location, and so did my relation to the geographies of philosophy. The country as a whole moved from being a periphery of “Europe” to the periphery of “The Middle East.” In the meantime, I moved from being a not-quite European woman philosopher to a not-quite Middle Eastern one, traveling among peripheries of sorts in my philosophical practice.
Let me explain. For any accented English speaker, “where are you from?” is an inevitable question. The response you receive after answering reveals the master discourses that shape the abstract cartography of the globe held by the mainstream Western (for lack of a better term) mind. Often, you learn “where you are from” from the person asking the question.
Europe is not a concrete location, and even less an objective geographic fact. Many philosophers from postcolonial and decolonial traditions (such as Denys Hey, Edward Said, Walter Mignolo, Sylvia Wynter, and others) make the point that what we call Europe exists as an amalgam of ideas regarding culture, history, and language, concretized by colonial conquest and its long aftermath. During my early days in the U.S., Turkey had an affinity with this amalgam, but as any European or Anglo-American would tell you, it was not quite there. Accordingly, I was somewhat European, but not really so. Less than a decade into the power of an authoritarian government in Turkey that was at the time much celebrated for its neoliberal economic policies in the States, I would frequently be asked whether I grew up traveling often to other European countries, how nice it must be to have EU passport, whether I have relatives in Europe. These questions took a while to get used to, and were clear in telling a certain kind of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of the single story” of the physical location of Turkey in the abstract map that exists in the Western mind: a space that exists at the edge of Europe, almost there but not quite, striving for Europeanness not only in its politics but also its identity. Not having a European passport since Turkey was never a part of the EU, definitely not having regularly traveled to Europe growing up since Turkey always had a much weaker currency and Europe always had strongly regulated borders and expensive visas, I would feel that my answers would both disappoint and affirm my audience in their convictions.
And then, Turkey lifted off from its location and flew into another continent to the equally vague cartographic category called the “Middle East” by Europeans and North Americans. I became Middle Eastern, but also, not quite. Turkey has undergone many events that are seen as destinies for the Global South: a violently-suppressed uprising, a failed coup attempt, a major refugee crisis, an internal “War on Terror,” an increased authoritarian hold, and a massive financial crash. The shift in the country’s location was palpable. People started asking me about my relation to Islam, whether I am allowed to ‘dress like this’ in my country, and how lucky I was to ‘get out of there.’ Race and geography are deeply enmeshed: I started receiving more comments about the fairness of my skin tone (which reflects the general absence of phenotypical unity in Turkey due to histories of imperialism) and questions on whether the rest of my family is darker than I am. Neither less surprising nor more fitting than the previous set, these questions still took a while to get used to. Like the first set, they are telling a certain single story this time of the “Middle East.” My responses are similarly disappointing, but also somehow affirming to my audience.
This post is not a nostalgic longing for a lost privilege of being called “Western.” That identity is never comfortable for those at its edges. Rather, it is about the limits of single stories of locations, their centers, and peripheries. Neither “center” nor “periphery” are by any means precise conceptual categories. “Periphery,” when defined primarily by mainstream perspectives, functions to produce other peripheries. As much as the periphery of Europe involves “being not quite Western,” the periphery of the Middle East or the Global South also involves being “not quite.” In that abstract map of the Western mind, I am not quite Middle Eastern or from the Global South, just as I was not quite European or white.
Thought is not separate from the world; academic philosophy is even less so. Both have geographies with centers and peripheries. Just as one has to justify their belonging to a culture and geography, in academic philosophical practice one must justify their own belonging to a tradition. The abstract cartography of academic philosophy depicts a limited world: in it, there are canonical geographies, for sure, such as Anglo-American Philosophy, German Philosophy, or French Philosophy. Philosophy as a discipline has been asked to question its own canons and centers for many years now; invaluable work is done to promote the rich intellectual traditions of diverse geographies that often reside in the experiences of not-quite. As a result, the field also now includes rarely acknowledged traditions confined to narrow corners as “peripheral,” such as Caribbean Philosophy, Latin American Philosophy, and Africana Philosophy. Even in this questioning, the field perpetuates the need to pick a tradition and a geography. The question of ‘what is your area of specialization?’ functions similarly to ‘where are you from?’ Just as one’s answer to the latter places one into an amalgam of assumed experiences, the former also serves to place one into an abstract commonality that binds one to a certain geography and separates them from others.
Throughout my formative years, Turkey (and I mean contemporary Turkey, not the one that was a part of Ancient Greece or Early Roman) was not a philosophical geography. Doing philosophy from the periphery often means traveling elsewhere, so I was committed to other geographies. I worked on French Philosophy and learned to write much more easily on the asylum system in France than on the prison structures of Turkey. The topic of the philosophical implications of feudal sovereignty in Europe were more central than the violent politics of emerging nation-states. After the attempted coup and its aftermaths, when I was not able to enter Turkey physically, I became unable to leave Turkey in my philosophical practice. I started writing on Turkey: on sites of death being formed every day, on towns and basements becoming zones of violence, on necropolitics, the politics of death that take place in spaces that do not exist in the small cartography of academic philosophy.
Discussing Turkey philosophically repeats the experience of ‘not quite’: not quite Europe and not quite even a peripheral geography of philosophy. The ambiguities that arise when your answer to the question ‘where are you from?’ does not place you somewhere concrete become experiences of solitude in philosophical practice. From this solitude, new forms of community emerged for me, as working on Turkey I connected to thoughts of other peripheries, such as Decolonial/LatinX feminisms, Critical Philosophy of Race, and the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition. As my work expanded in its theoretical assemblage, I was welcomed by and became a part of various support systems, often also ‘in the periphery’ of the discipline. I learned that the gate-keeping that divides peripheries falls on the white or “Western” mind once again, on that abstract map of single stories, where each should dwell in their own tradition. The center is always more eager to define the periphery and give it a single story, together defining those who are not-quite.
The experience of not-quite has much to do with what Mariana Ortega calls ‘in-between.’ For Ortega, in-betweenness is an experience of liminal subjectivity, being tugged from both sides, torn between conflicting commitments, an experience that arises from the presence of too much contextual and cultural data. This liminal subjectivity is akin to María Lugones’ sense of “world-traveling,” a kind of flexibility that is acquired and practiced usually by ‘outsiders’ to the mainstream, to move between different constructions of life, values, and norms. Being in-between, one becomes affiliated and familiar with too many worlds to comfortably belong.
Being “not quite” speaks to an experience not of being in too many worlds but never fully in any world. This not fitting follows from the inadequacy of the dominant paradigms: categories of “Western” and “Non-Western,” European or Middle Eastern, posed from the perspective of the “West” or the Global North, are incomplete categories. What they mean is ambiguously defined and continuously shifting. Lugones says worlds where such categories are operative are ‘incomplete worlds,’ worlds in which some referents are not wholly constructed, or constructed negatively. The social and academic world we inhabit is one such world, where center and periphery, Western and Non-Western, and North and South are often defined from the perspective of the mainstream organization, only revolving around single stories, even when these single stories function as organizing labels.
Moreover, efforts of academic practice that find their footing in these categories end up reproducing further incomplete worlds, creating centers around incomplete worlds. Say, efforts to diversify and multiply spaces for peripheral existence on the basis of these incomplete categories often end up building borders between them in attempts to fit them into single stories. In addition, efforts of traveling among worlds that are built on incomplete categories often end up following the route of what Martinican Philosopher Édouard Glissant calls “arrow-like nomadism:” a nomadism of thought that “travels from periphery to periphery, making every periphery into a center.” Rather than critiquing the positionality of the center, this kind of nomadism creates further centers that purport to be complete, further loci of dominant construction, and in turn, multiplies its outsides indefinitely. For example, such nomadism provides a single story for what is Non-Western, and then makes a center for Non-Western thought, even though such center is built on an incomplete category of “Non-Western.”
Rather than trying to fit the not-quite experiences into incomplete categories, we would gain much from multiplying sites of coalition among experiences of not-quite, building bridges that do not break others’ backs, and opening ourselves to constructions of ourselves that are neither insular nor fully shaped by dominant constructions. This involves creating venues for South-South dialogues, or periphery-to-periphery channels of thought. Moreover, and perhaps at further risk, it involves complicating the aim of making the world where one is ‘at home’ into a center. Nonetheless, what it can accomplish is stronger coalitions across peripheries. As I come to understand it, world-traveling is a way of learning to love others and oneself: having a true appreciation of worlds that are not one’s ‘own’ is a fundamental component of multiplying dialogues across peripheries, and such love does not easily come about when one does not leave one’s ‘home.’
This work involves a certain unease. As a Turkish woman, here writing on Lugones, a Latina Feminist Philosopher, I am not ‘at ease’ in this world. Nonetheless, for those of us construed in not-quite categories, world-traveling is a matter of survival when it comes to constructing one’s sense of self apart from existing incomplete constructions. Engaging with (talking, teaching, writing, presenting, discussing) work by those such as María Lugones, Mariana Ortega, Linda Alcoff, Sylvia Wynter, and so many others, has been fundamental in understanding the limitations of existing categories, finding academic and philosophical worlds, in writing of an experience that is mine. Perhaps more importantly, it also has been meaningful in allowing me to open up further channels of world traveling, in my teaching and in my organizing and service.
World-traveling between ‘not quite’ experiences should be incorporated in our academic practice, both in the way we promote values (especially around plurality, diversity, and inclusion) in our profession, and in the way that we define geographies and traditions in our philosophical endeavors. I recommend shifting the focus in our academic practices from incomplete constructions, such as Europe, continental, or the very vague abstract category that is called “Non-Western” to cover the entirety of the world that is not Europe or Anglo-America. We can put more efforts into creating channels of dialogue across peripheries of thought, multiplying interactions and coalitions, rather than following the arrow-like nomadism of dominant thought, creating centers after centers of peripheries and building borders in between. Traveling outside one’s home involves much unease indeed, but there is much to be gained for those of us who think from the various edges of Philosophy.
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Ege Selin Islekel
Ege Selin Islekel is Accountability, Climate, Equity, and Sustainability (ACES) Fellow at Texas A&M University and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. from the Philosophy Department at DePaul University. Her first book,Nightmare Knowledges: Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance, is currently under contract with Northwestern University Press. She is the co-editor of Foucault, Derrida, and the Biopolitics of Punishment (Northwestern University Press, 2022). Her articles in English and Turkish appear in journals such as Philosophy Compass, Theory&Event, Hypatia, CLR James Journal, philoSOPHIA, Philosophy Today, and anthologies such as Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory, and Writing Sex.
