The phrase “Sea of languages” (Akbari and Mallette, 2013) spotlights a medieval Mediterranean where languages and cultures have long existed in states of confluence, appropriation, and contestation. Shifting the focus forward to the modern period, beginning with the late Ottoman empire, this panel fills a gap in Mediterranean Cultural Studies scholarship by showcasing the complex dynamics of conflict, seduction, and influence animating interactions between literary genres, languages, and trends of thought across the Mediterranean. These transactions take place in a context of crisis instigated by modern forms of imperialism (Ottoman and French) and conflicting ideologies of twentieth century (il-)liberalism. Though linguistic and cultural interactions in a modern imperial context have been studied in relation to national languages (Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, or European colonial languages), our panel provides a fresh perspective by conjoining these disparate disciplinary outlooks to query the kind of mutual influences and formal innovations that underpin the production of culture in a trans-Mediterranean framework. Each presenter will speak for 15 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for unstructured discussion.
In “The Mediterranean Economy of Translation in Ottoman-Turkish Novelistic Writing,” Mehtap Ozdemir investigates the notion of transaction in relation to the economy of translation that informed the late Ottoman literary context in the triangulated process of literary emulation. Taking her cue from Kamran Rastegar’s concept of “textual transactions,” Ozdemir reads Ahmet Midhat’s Hasan Mellah (1874) and Ahmet Metin ve Şirzat (1892) as two novels which the author acknowledged to be emulative responses to Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1846). The presentation shows how Midhat’s transaction operated as a triangulated translation within a trans-Mediterranean textual economy including Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Voyages d'Ali Bey el Abbassi (1814) as well as Monte Cristo. This literary emulation not only constitutes a trans-Mediterranean textual archive in Arabic, French, and English, but also reconfigures the Mediterranean as an Ottoman/Turkish chronotope in historical and literary terms.
Trans-Mediterranean transactions along the East/West axis acquired new valence when France colonized Algeria, destabilizing the country’s imbrication within the Ottoman Empire. In “Algeria as ‘the Second Anatolia’: The Ottoman Lens on the French Colonization of the Maghreb,” C. Ceyhun Arslan highlights the role of language in negotiating a sense of alienation and nostalgia for a disappearing wor(l)d order. Through his examination of the Arabic poetry of Algerian ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī and the Ottoman Turkish narrative From the Memoir of Algeria by Halil Halid, Arslan’s analysis situates late 19th-century Algeria within the Mediterranean’s longue durée history in relation to places as diverse as Anatolia and the Balkans. Here language functions at the intersection of complicity and resistance to the new French colonial order: Halid can only communicate with Algerians in French yet observes that French colonizers eliminate Ottoman Turkish inscriptions on buildings that they appropriate. In turn, exiled al-Jazāʾirī composes poetry following conventions of classical Arabic, a “language” of security in a cataclysmic moment. These late Ottoman Turkish and Arabic works recast Algeria’s history beyond postcolonial and nationalist historiographical models, making its evolution a harbinger of the Ottoman Empire’s demise.
Tristan Leperlier’s “A War Between Languages? Arabophone and Francophone Writers During the Algerian Civil War in the 1990s” brings the discussion of the politicization of language use in an Algerian context to the late twentieth century. The linguistic divide between French and Arabic during the civil war period encapsulates the major literary conflict of the period, which opposed the Arabophone Tahar Ouettar and the Francophone Tahar Djaout. Leperlier’s sociological approach shows how their opposite political evolution is not only the result of the political crisis, but must also be explained by long-term competitions within their transnational, plurilingual literary field—and by the linguistic synchronization between the literary, journalistic, and academic fields.
Ken Seigneurie’s “Disaffection, Not Dismissal: Mid-Twentieth-Century Egyptian Novels Against Liberalism” spotlights 1950s Egyptian cultural politics and its nexus with language choice. Against the background of rising Islamist illiberalism (Sayyid Qutb) Seigneurie delineates a multilingual novelistic corpus (Arabophone Naguib Mahfouz, Anglophone Waguih Ghali, and Francophone Albert Cossery) that responded in various ways to the country’s political, economic, and social upheaval in the 1950s. Seigneurie shows how these texts represent turbulent and ambivalent articulations of the figure of the modern Egyptian intellectual through withering critiques of liberal thought that nevertheless stop short of rejecting it. These authors write in languages that not only draw on complex and conflicted trans-Mediterranean cultural traditions but also reveal how intellectual liberal thought can navigate and productively adapt to an illiberal and authoritarian political context.