The Changing Configurations of Self-(M)other Dialogue in North Cyprus

Abstract

This paper deals with issues of identity, nationalism, postcolonialism, and self-other relations with a focus on a period of transformative events in North Cyprus. It notes how nationalism has been the dominant means of identification for Cypriots in their modern history, and argues that unless weakened and supplanted by a radically pluralist democracy, nationalism imagines one's identity as an indivisible unity and has no place for different others within the nation. However, a pressing relationship with others and otherness is no stranger to Cypriots either, which makes it clear that the border that defines the ‘we’ of such nationalism is, at the same time, the line that divides the self intrinsically, indicating the otherness of the self or its alterity. Subjectivity involves subjection to the other.