Rhythmanalysts of the postcolonial partitioned diaspora: Writing differential Cyprus through Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan

This article assigns the literary as the preferred means to write Cyprus because it captures the powerful “truth” of space and place, which exposes the dominant binary so as to generate solidarity between deeply divided and displaced people in postcolonial partitioned cases like Cyprus. The focus is on literatures of Cyprus or literary Cyprus, which can be defined as a transnational world-literature, wherein all the texts are colonial and postcolonial diasporic writings operating through a system of inequality and displacement, especially in relation to literary, cultural, and language centres and peripheries that are outside. This is demonstrated through a survey of literary Cyprus, with particular emphasis on the cypriotgreek and cypriotturkish diasporic identification developed during the last years of British colonial and particularly postcolonial partitioned Cyprus. This is an examination of the literary and lived practices of Stephanos Stepahnides, Aydin Mehmet Ali, and Alev Adil, three contemporary Anglophone writers of the Cypriot diaspora, with emphasis on the ways these pioneers come together actively to write, read, and construct Cyprus in relation to various positions. This includes their own marginalized positions between Britain and Cyprus, as well as the dominant positions between Britain, Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus within the colonial, postcolonial, and partition moments, where the writers produce a Cyprus for their diasporic selves, the Cypriot selves, British selves, and various other selves. In this process they capture multiple Cypruses for multiple selves, which shows that spatial construction determines “identity” formation, where both are always in production. This positioning and production will be illuminated through various empirical–theoretical spatial approaches, with emphasis on Henri Lefebvre’s “spatiology” that enables the “rhythmanalyst” to capture the “truth of space” for a “differential space”, and Yi-Fu Tuan’s closed “place” and open “space”, met with postcolonial approaches to “identity” as “identification” and “positioning”. The article shows that as rhythmanalysts the writers analyse “rhythms” related to many positions and Cypruses, with emphasis on three that capture the humanly lived places/spaces for the actual production of a differential Cyprus.