145 Chapter 7 EUrientation Anxieties Islamic Sexualities and the Construction of Europeanness Piro Rexhepi In an interview in 2009, Ismail Kadare who had just received the Prince of Asturias Award, addressing his position as a dissident writer in communist Albania, argued that, “what excited suspicion [by the Albanian communist regime] was, ‘why does the western bourgeoisie hold a writer from a Stalinist country in high esteem?’” 1 . Yet, the communist regime not only allowed the Albanian writer to travel to France (a very rare privilege reserved only for those close to the regime) but engaged in promoting his rise to prominence in European literary circles. For the communist regime, Kadare provided a historical fiction that, as Morgan argues, “represented Albanian identity as something native and authentic over and against Ottoman, Soviet or, later, Maoist, influences”, mirroring the regime’s desire to situate Albania, not only as a constitutive part of Europe, but as its guardian of the frontier between Europe and its eastern Others 2 . As Morley and Robins put it, This desire for clarity, this need to know precisely where Europe ends, is about the construction of a symbolic geography that will separate the insiders from the outsiders (the Others). Implicit in these words is the suggestion that the next Iron Curtain should divide Europe from, and insulate it against, the Islamic Other 3 . For the Europeans, Kadare presented an opportunity to gaze inside what was considered one of the most isolated communist regimes, providing semi- fictionalized Orientalist narratives of oppression and violence supposedly endured by Albanians under the Ottoman Empire, which he later argued was a metaphor for the communist regime. Kadare’s stories, then as now, provide the European postcolonial market place with the possibility of both objectifying and commodifying internalized Orientalist cultural productions in the service of European enlargement, particularly as Kadare’s narrative is 07_Krajina & Blanusa_C007.indd 145 6/29/2016 12:50:02 PM