6 Lindsey Devers and Sarah Bacon understand honor crime as “the killing of a female, typically by a male perpetrator, because of perceived or actual misconduct of the victim who has dishonored or shamed her family and clan by actually or allegedly committing an indiscretion” (360). Kwame Appiah points out that under the honor code women appear “less worthy of respect” than men, and he speaks of “wars against women” (Honor 167).
7 In our context, “culture” is only obliquely a phenomenon covered by the evolutionary approach of Churchill, for whom it is “an evolving product of groups, or populations, and of human brains” (184). Ermers’s approach is communicative, building for instance on Edward T. Hall: “beliefs, symbols and meanings […] which facilitate ways people of a given community can communicate with each other”; this includes “customary beliefs” and “(attributed) shared attitudes, values, goals, conventions and practices” (3.1.8). People can retain their moral norms and values when they “ ‘shed off’ (partly) their original culture and acquire a new one – or have several ones at once” (3.1.8.2). In our context, a static definition covers most cases: “an identifiable, pass-on-able, mutually adopted set or shared semiotic system of inherent meanings, acceptable behaviors” (Kulich and Weng 16); that it can be passed on to the next generation is decisive for tradition (see Hall 49–50 on cultural transmission, also Idang). This is also associated with a needs-based concept: culture is then evidence of a “need to associate with, identify with, and seek similarity, comfort/security, and belongingness in the inherent and constructed codes of a community” (Kulich and Weng 16–17). For the passing on of “the sense-making process of culture” together with “a sense of communal identity,” creating a tension with individual identity, see Ting-Toomey and Dorjee 42.
8 We agree with Talhelm et al. when they point out: “Even though psychology has cataloged a long list of East-West differences, it still lacks an accepted explanation of what causes these differences” (603).
9 Pakistan undertook new legislation concerning honor in 2016, not for the first time: Criminal Law (Amendment) (Offences in the Name or Pretext of Honour) Act; powerful clerics opposed the bill as “anti-Islamic” (see also Bilal). In India, The Centre in 2018 announced to the Supreme Court that it would bring a law to make honor killing a cognizable offense. In 2009, a Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) was enacted in Afghanistan by decree, but not ratified in parliament (see Churchill 243–44).
10 Robert Ermers takes face and dignity to be “universal concepts” (171). He adds that, as “loss of status,” face is usually “not a moral issue,” so that, owing to his moral concept of honor, it is “not equivalent to loss of honor” (52). This emphasis is not wholly supported in Patai’s analysis, to which Ermers does not refer. We observe that the loss of face (as well as the loss of honor) often results from moral misconduct and should therefore be regarded as a “moral issue.”
11 While affirming that literature “solves no problems and saves no souls,” Derek Attridge in Singularity insists that “it is effective, even if its effects are not predictable enough to serve a political or moral program” (4); “it has had a role to play in significant, and frequently laudable, social changes […]” (8). Accordingly, it is “an effective social agent” (Work 146). Elif Shafak observes: “All around the world, literature has played a tremendous role in projects of nation-building”; yet in cases of belated modernity, “literature has not only been one of the many constitutive forces of the nation-building process, but rather the constitutive force” as writers “paved the way for the transfer of state power” (“Accelerating” 24).
12 This would be equivalent to reading with emphasis on the “illusion of denotation and referentiality,” the semantics of sign-referent relations, in Harry Berger’s understanding (62, 103).
13 Ideally, one should be able to analyze “the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context” (Alcoff 26), which inevitably becomes a political arena. Regrettably, this goes beyond what we can offer at present, both for literary works from earlier periods and for those of our time.
14 http://english.republika.mk/ayfer-tunc-turkish-writer-i-dont-write-to-be-on-a-best-selling-list/, removed by Feb. 2019.
15 In a WhatsApp message to Mine Krause, Tunç underlines a similar aspect, saying that she is not addressing any specific readership at all, but simply writing from the perspective of a Turkish writer and, while doing so, not thinking of a potential Western reader who generally expects ethnic, neo-orientalist novels from countries like hers. In a short story, “Mikail’s Heart Stopped,” Tunç describes a district which in the past has welcomed the main female character “to its festering bosom in her times of poverty when she had lived through thousands of heartaches and humiliation,” characterized by “the smell of blood that flowed from the broken noses of women beaten every night, and the echo of the violence of strong against weak shown without demur as something very normal.” In the story’s setting, “even a little slip of the foot would flatten one’s honour in a trice.” The vivid narrative evokes ruined lives. But the point is that it does not necessarily evoke a chasm between its setting and Western conditions.
16 Orhan Pamuk reaches more readers outside of Turkey than inside the country: “My readers inside of Turkey and outside of Turkey are […] women and students who like to read novels, and ‘intellectuals’ who want to be updated on the scene. […] But that may be less true outside of Turkey. Ninety-five percent of men over 35 don’t read novels in my part of the world” (http://www.caroldbecker.com/sitepages/interviews/interviews_by/orhan-pamuk.html).
17 Khan and Afsar, for instance, use this figuration (426), a replay of Dabashi’s earlier lambasting of Azar Nafisi; apart from Hosseini, Orhan Pamuk (as reported in Göknar 23), Yasmina Khadra, and Elif Shafak have been scripted into the role. It misapplies Gayatri Spivak’s theorizing of a figure, building on Edward Said’s concepts, who is “a blank, though generative of a text of cultural identity that only the West (or a Western-model discipline) could inscribe,” a “self-marginalizing or self-consolidating migrant” including the native subaltern female, needed and foreclosed by the “European” who is “the human norm” (Critique 6). The native informant’s data are “to be interpreted by the knowing subject for reading” (Critique 49). A related category is “comprador intelligentsia” (Appiah, “Postcolonial” 119).
18 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/24/fiction.voicesofprotest.
19 An artist’s thematizing of depraved conditions in her/his own country may be assessed differently according to positionality: a Western writer at home in what may appear to be a hegemonic environment does not need to negotiate cultural and commercial
