Representing the Romani ‘other’ in contemporary Turkish fiction: Negotiating Romani identity in Ayşegül Devecioğlu’s Ağlayan Dağ Susan Nehir

Abstract

This article interrogates the representation of the Romani ‘other’ in Ayşegül Devecioğlu’s Ağlayan Dağ Susan Nehir (2007) within the epistemic shifts that have reconfigured Turkish literary discourse in the post-1980 period. The article argues that the novel, emerging from the transition from class-based to identity-oriented paradigms of oppression, employs spatial, cultural and discursive frameworks to unveil the structural mechanisms that govern Romani subjectivity. The article reveals that the protagonist’s internalised self-negation mirrors the broader socio-political structures that cast the Roma as an ontological anomaly within the national imaginary, and that by critiquing homogenisation, systemic exclusion and epistemic erasure, the novel situates Romani identity at the intersection of local and global histories of marginalisation. The article further demonstrates that through its inscription of the Romani experience within a transnational matrix of subjugation, the novel challenges the hegemonic logics of nation-state formation and reasserts the subaltern voice as a site of both resistance and narrative agency.