Assembling Kadıköy

This article examines Kadıköyü’nün Romanı by Safiye Erol as a literary articulation of urban becoming, where space, subjectivity, and affect are co-produced through embodied practices, emotional atmospheres, and mobile encounters. Rather than treating the novel as a nostalgic representation of early Republican Istanbul or a romantic narrative of youth, the analysis foregrounds it as a site of spatial composition and affective cartography. Drawing on affect theory (Ben Anderson, Sara Ahmed), Deleuzian assemblage thinking, and mobility studies (Tim Ingold, Nigel Thrift), the article explores how Kadıköy is rendered not as a stable backdrop but as a living, shifting urban assemblage. The novel’s modes of movement—walking, driving, and rowing—are treated as affective spatial practices that modulate attention, relationality, and emotional intensity. The affective register of the novel transforms over time, moving from collective exuberance to spatialized sorrow, particularly through the emergence of ıztırap, a persistent suffering that saturates both characters and the places they inhabit. By reading Kadıköyü’nün Romanı as a textured geography of emotion, memory, and motion, the article argues for a conception of urban modernity that exceeds infrastructural or ideological paradigms. Kadıköy becomes a porous district, assembled through rhythms, atmospheres, and attachments—felt, remembered, and eventually departed from. Through this reading, the novel is situated within a broader discourse of affective urbanism and literary spatial thought, demonstrating how fiction may serve as a mode of spatial thinking and emotional mapping in periods of urban transformation

Affect (linguistics · Articulation (sociology · Assemblage (archaeology · Embodied cognition · Ideology · Modernity · Narrative · Reading (process · Urban theory · Urbanism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Spatial and Cultural Studies · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation