American Research Journal of English and Literature

In this article, I use the insights of new historicism to comprehensively analyze Shafak’s novel Honour (2012). I focus on the male protagonist, Iskender, as I aim to gain new insights on the phenomenon of honour killings by adding the “why” and “how” the crime is viewed through the lens of the perpetrator himself. And, I argue that the idea of honour is linked to communal surveillance. By communal surveillance, I mean that traditional codes from the killer’s country of origin have been displaced into the migrant community. These displaced beliefs that do not fully fit in with the new British society nonetheless define the killer’s notion of honour. I demonstrate how internalized surveillance encourages crime rather than hindering its commission while paradoxically it preserves the main concept of discipline and punish. Accordingly, honour killings are based on what I would call Foucault’s “panopticon in reverse.”