The Literary Misencounter: South-South Hermeneutics in Asli Erdoğan’s The City in Crimson Cloak

This article examines the award-winning Turkish author Aslı Erdoğan’s The City in Crimson Cloak (Kırmızı Pelerinli Kent, 1998) to explore how post-1989 literature may theorize transnational solidarity. Recounting the days of a Turkish woman who abandons her doctoral studies in Rio de Janeiro to become a writer, Erdoğan’s novel becomes a meditation on alterity, diasporic existence, and writing itself as a form of belonging. This article argues that the novel elaborates a hermeneutic for South-South contact, one that aligns neither with the exoticizing representations of global tourism nor with the well-intentioned yet ultimately self-serving practices of human rights activism. The South-South encounter here appears as an exposure that undoes common ways of seeing and feeling, a transnational palimpsest of moralities at once oppressive and liberating, and a thoroughly intersectional disjuncture whose divides across race, class, gender, and nationality render solidarity nearly impossible. While early work in Global South Studies focused on the genealogy of internationalist praxis and ideology, there has been a growing interest in the agency of literary works in such articulations. This article contributes to this scholarship by exploring a negative capacity of post-1989 fiction, namely, the capacity to expose the ethical and political aporias of transnational contact.