One of the most central tensions in Snow seems to be a geographic one—that is, between Europe (as well as the Turkish government that emulates the West) and between the people in rural Turkey oppressed by Westernization. Throughout the text, this conflict is revealed to not only be geographic, but also political—between so-called liberalism and conservative traditionalism—and even religious—between secularism and observant Islamism. Most interestingly, however, Snow reveals to us the key ways in which the two sides of this conflict are somewhat dependent on each other: Westernized Turks, after all, need Islamic fundamentalism and "terrorism" to drive support for military crackdowns and coups; meanwhile, the Islamists also paint a one-dimensional picture of Westerners and Westernized Turks as immoral and supercilious in order to drive sectarian violence and fight for their liberation.
At the heart of all this is something that Palestinian-American literary critic and professor Edward Said has termed "Orientalism." In his landmark text, Orientalism (1978), Said defines Orientalism as a network of three distinct phenomena, each of which are mutually reinforcing. First, Said describes Orientalism as a scholarly tradition which seeks to interpret and study the "East," broadly construed, from the perspective of a Westerner. This includes not only academic work, but also the aesthetic works which take the East as a focus. Second, Said speaks of Orientalism as an "ontological and epistemological distinction" made between the Orient (East) and the Occident (West). These first two aspects of Orientalism interact quite robustly, and also go along with the third idea of Orientalism introduced by Said—that is, the idea that Orientalism is a corporate structure leading to the military, intellectual, and cultural subjugation of the East based on the assumed or perceived supremacy of the West. In sum then, what Said describes is a materially and historically reinforced system that controls the language and discourse surrounding Eastern life and culture, represents it erroneously as backward, primitive, or inferior, and serves this distorted image of the East up to Western academics, politicians, and capitalists in an effort to provide support for Western supremacy and colonial projects.
This idea clearly maps to the domestic tensions that are present in Snow's Turkey. Kars, a city in Turkey's East far away from the seat of power, is rendered as a regressive and religiously orthodox place occupied by violent separatists. This is then used to justify the heavy presence of intelligence agents in the city, the banning of the "politically Islamic" hijab, and the coup put on by Sunay Zaim in order to restore "republicanism" in the town. What is most, interesting, however, is that the people being made exotic and other have the same citizenship status as the people who are doing the labelling. Blue, for example, looks even more Western than most Turks, but the political establishment in Ankara and the media in Istanbul paints him out to be a violent monster. This is in line with Milica Bakić-Hayden's idea of "Nesting Orientalisms," or the idea that, even within the same territory, "primordial" and stereotyped qualities are assigned to those in the Eastern and Southern regions of countries like the former Yugoslavia. By this logic, one can see in Snow how Western, Orthodox and secular Turks distance themselves from Muslim Turks in a somewhat Orientalist way. Of course, the word "Orientalism" describes a very specific cultural context and might not be completely applicable in this context, but the practice of othering on a basis reinforced by location, religion, culture, and academia certainly applies.
At the same time as Said's theories accrued influence however, many critiques of Orientalism have been presented in the field of post-colonial studies, and one does well to apply such critiques to our analysis of Snow. As a counter-claim to Orientalism as political threat, some have accused Said of "Occidentalism"—that is, depicting the West unfairly as a uniform and static oppressive agent, just as the West has supposedly done to the East. Some, like the New Criterion's Keith Windschuttle, have even gone so far as to say that Orientalism is a philosophy evolving from a victim complex. Milder critiques, which are more applicable to our work here, include those of critic and professor Homi Bhabha, who suggests that identity construction in a post-colonial state fundamentally relies on the conflict between colonizer and colonized subject. Neither the colonizer nor the colonized sits motionless as the other side increases its resistance or oppression—rather, as we see in Snow, each side uses a fixed notion of the other side's identity to further radicalize and mobilize their own side. In this way, both a subject's stereotyped view of the other and one's reactionary identity (based on that stereotype) are based on the insecurities of the subject. Kadife stereotypes Westerners as atheistic, supercilious, and invasive; this then drives a reactionary identity as an Islamic feminist and anti-atheist. Someone like Z Demirkol, then, stereotypes Islamists in Kars as violent and chooses to amp up his own violent sensibilities in service of repressing ordinary people. The flow goes both ways in Kars, and as we see in the characters of Ka and Orhan, this is precisely why no outsider is trusted. An outsider who takes neither side is trusted by no one to accurately relay the stories of Kars to the outside world, and we see this idea expressed to the text's two writers time and again.
