A space where European empires, especially the British, had turned to for inspiration during times of crisis, as is evident from Mark Byron’s abstract, Byzantium becomes symbolic of a world of empires, trade, and migration. For this reason the Byzantine empire over a period of eleven centuries became part of a Mediterranean collective consciousness. For the British as Byron shows, Byzantium was a form of measure with other global empires. Shedding light on the English imaginary of Byzantium will offer an opportunity for all panelists to compare imaginaries of Byzantium and its impact on modern Eastern Mediterranean nationalisms. C.P. Cavafy’s Poems (1933), also to be discussed, constitutes a landmark of such cultural memory which combines both English and Greek imaginaries of Byzantium.

In addition to exploring national and British imaginaries of Byzantium and the implications of such an imaginary on nationalisms, the panel examines cultural and religious coexistence of Christians and Muslims. David Williams’s presentation will demonstrate how practices and narratives between Muslims and Christians made possible the sharing and using of the same religious spaces. Anthony Paraskeva’s abstract that stresses the dialogic interaction between Greek pagan religion and Christianity in the poetry of C. P. Cavafy will offer another opportunity to explore the transformation of the dichotomy between “pagan” versus “Christian” into “Christian” versus “Muslim” during and after the Byzantine period.

Questions about religion, paganism, Christianity, Islam and their influence on one another are as central to this conversation as the question of multilingualism. In response to as well as in conjunction with global English, the panel explores Byzantium in a modern social and political context as it preserves “linguistic borders as crossing-places rather than an indication of impenetrability” (Spivak 2014). On a broader view, the panel seeks to address the great absence of Byzantium from studies of empire and the early modern period. Scholars of Mediterranean studies have been increasingly interested in the connections between Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims. Much of this work has been focusing on studies of Judeo Arabic in Andalusia in the twelfth century. This panel intends to initiate a conversation and exchange ideas about the region of the Levant, Greeks, Arabs and the Eastern Mediterranean people more broadly.