Conflicting Representations of Alafranga: Western Modernity, Moral Panic, and Divided Memory in Late Ottoman Literature
Conflicting Representations of Alafranga: Western Modernity, Moral Panic, and Divided Memory in Late Ottoman Literature

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the figure of the alafranga as a shifting cultural and moral category through which late Ottoman and early Republican literature negotiated Westernisation, national belonging, and historical memory in the Eastern Mediterranean. Focusing on two canonical novels—Ahmet Midhat’s Felвtun Bey ile Rвkım Efendi (1875) and Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s Sodom ve Gomore (1928)—it traces the transformation of the alafranga from a comical, Westernised dandy into a symbol of moral decadence, political betrayal, and sexual deviance. This transformation is situated within two historical impasses: the reformist crisis of the Tanzimat period and the nationalist rupture produced by war, occupation, and mass violence in the 1910s and early 1920s. Reading literary representations alongside broader Mediterranean debates on cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and moral regulation, the article shows how Istanbul—and particularly Pera—was retrospectively recoded as a space of civilisational exhaustion. In this process, gender and sexuality emerged as key sites for negotiating political loyalty, rendering the alafranga a repository for anxieties surrounding imperial decline. The article contributes to Mediterranean historiography by foregrounding literature as an active agent in the production of post-imperial moral and mnemonic regimes.

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