Batı Düşüncesinde Doğu İmgesi: Jonas Hassen Khemiri’nin İstila! Oyunu
The Image of the East in Western Thought: The Play Invasion! By Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Summary/Abstract: In this study, I approached the play Invasion! by Jonas Hassen Khemiri in the framework of orientalism. Edward Said regards orientalism as a way of thinking that depends on an epistemological and ontological distinction between the East and the West. In the orientalist view, the West must first define and introduce the East in order to define itself. The West establishes a hegemonical structure over the East. The West and the East are constructed as imagined places rather than real ones. With a historical perspective that challenges the irrevocable myth of the East, he disrupts the fixated Eastern character by renouncing first the Abulkasem in One Thousand and One Nights and then the Abulkasem in the play Signora Luna by Carl Jonas Love Almquist, a prominent poet and playwright from Sweden. The myth of Abulkasem takes a new shape after Khemiri. He parodies the Abulkasem that is unchangeable from the perspective of the West by turning everyone and everything into Abulkasem or by ‘Abulkasemizing’ them. The play, set in Sweden, underscores that not every Middle Eastern immigrant living in Sweden is the same Abulkasem. While Invasion! unveils the characteristics associated with the East through orientalist racism and perception; it does not comment on how the West defines the East as the other only. It also reveals how the East perceives and comprehends itself from the perspective of the West. In that regard, I first delved into the concept of orientalism and then opened for discussion the argument that otherness is two-sided in the play in question.

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