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Kritika Kultura

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9494-6590

Abstract

This article re-examines the Turkish reception of Fredric Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” through the lens of Aijaz Ahmad’s influential critique, which has shaped the readings of Murat Belge, Ahmet Oktay, Nurdan Gürbilek, Meltem Gürle, and Besim Dellaloğlu. These critics, following Ahmad, have charged Jameson with advancing a reductionist and at times Orientalist/Eurocentric view by claiming that the Third World (now the Global South) is structurally compelled to produce national allegories. Ahmad’s objection that the Third World cannot be reduced to a single form such as national allegory ultimately misreads Jameson’s broader theoretical engagement with allegory. Challenging these assumptions, this article demonstrates: (a) the weaknesses of Ahmad’s critique; (b) the limitations that arise from the Turkish critics’ largely Ahmad-mediated understanding of Jameson; and (c) from a meta-critical perspective, how the longstanding process of de-Marxification in Turkey has contributed to persistent misreadings of Jameson’s national allegory thesis. The article argues that Jameson’s position is grounded not in notions of cultural belatedness, as suggested by Belge, Gürle, and Gürbilek, but in the historical logic of modes of production. It further defends his allegorical method as one that resists both cultural incommensurability and the uncritical application of Western categories to non-Western texts. In doing so, the article presents the first sustained defense of the national allegory thesis from a Jamesonian perspective within the Turkish context.

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