Unsettling the metaphor: The failure of liberal hybridity in Fatih Akin’s Crossing The Bridge

This article examines Fatih Akin’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, which focuses on the contemporary music scene in the city. It argues that through its narrative structure and narrator’s voice, the documentary latently reproduces Orientalizing assumptions and frameworks and ends up undermining the understanding of hybridity that it purportedly promotes as a boundary-blurring process of cross-fertilization. Strikingly, the documentary’s liberal-pluralist interpretation of the bridge in Istanbul as a metaphor for harmonious amalgamation and/or transculturation also collapses halfway through the film. The bridge, instead, transforms into a boundary-marking device which, as it renders Turkey Europe’s periphery, at the same time promises the European subject an imaginary voyage over space and time that enables his access to an ‘authenticity’ untouched by modernity. The article concludes with an analysis of the accounts of two particular participants in the documentary which reveal the limits of both the liberal-pluralist and nationalist appropriations of the bridge as a metaphor for Turkish identity and culture.