To promote discussion, we have selected only three panelists who will be strictly limited to 15-minute papers. Ozen Dolcerocca, the respondent, will pose questions both to the panelists and the audience so that a lively discussion may ensue. We will begin with “Adab as Literary-Political Ethics and Ottoman Moral Imagination” by Mehtap Ozdemir. Building on recent scholarship that posits literature as a modern concept and suggests revisiting non-European literatures in terms of their own epistemic systems, Ozdemir reflects on the politics of moral imagination in the late Ottoman world as a way of exploring the relevance of the Persianate adab culture for Ottoman literary modernity. Her paper explores how advice literature or mirror for princes, were appropriated and remade by Ottoman modernizers during the long nineteenth century. Verging on the literary, the ethical, and the political at once, these include Namık Kemal’s translation of an Indo-Persian romance Bahar-ı Daniş, Emin Yümni’s translation of Nizami’s Heft Peyker, Ahmed Midhat’s translation of Humayunname (also known as Kalila wa Dimna), Ahmed Midhat’s translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, and Şemseddin Sami’s theatrical adaptation of Firdevsi’s Shahname. While they traverse different forms (romance, fable, and epic), these texts all revolve around the ethics of just rule. In reading these translational engagements with an eye to the link between the education of the ideal ruler and the politics of literary sovereignty, Ozdemir posits adab as literary-political ethics central to the historicizing reconsiderations of Ottoman literary modernity.
Sam Hodgkin, in “Steppe Atlantis: The Khazar Hypothesis in the 20th Century” focuses on the same period in West Asia, this time moving the question of ethics and politics in relation to literature to the Khazar context. From the late 18th to the mid-20th centuries, the idea of the Khazar state seized the imagination of Turkish and Hungarian enthusiasts of pan-Turanism, German Jewish historical novelists, and Soviet theorists of ethnogenesis. Hodgkin’s paper surveys the various ways that the Khazar hypothesis complicated theorizations of race and cultural genealogy in the age of the nation. The Khazar became the central case study for introducing the Altaic as a third term for the Indo-European/Semitic binary of Western philology. For some Karaite Jews, it became the basis for disaffiliation from global Jewry; for Arthur Koestler, it became an opportunity to theorize a Jewishness beyond race. Hodgkin’s paper will conclude with the national politics of two late Khazar novels: Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) and Dmitrii Bykov’s ZhD (2006).
The formal presentations will conclude with Jennifer Manoukian’s “Book Societies, Literary Translation and the Spread of “Enlightenment” among Ottoman Armenians (c. 1840-c. 1860).” In the 1840s, a multifaceted cultural-nationalist movement gained momentum among Armenian intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire. At the heart of this movement was a yearning to cultivate a sense of national consciousness and to secure “enlightenment” for the Armenian national community in the making. A major pillar of this national project was the cultivation of ընթերցասիրութիւն, or a love of reading, in hopes of changing negative attitudes toward the practice and increasing literacy. It was in this intellectual climate that we find the proliferation of book societies that funded and published literary translations. Manoukian will begin by discussing Ottoman Armenian preconceptions about reading and literature in the mid-nineteenth century. Her paper will then explore the work of two prolific book societies, using the literary works they translated to shed light on varying conceptions of enlightenment among the intelligentsia. It looks at the language variety used in their translations, illustrating how the use of a vernacular form of Armenian challenged long dominant conventions that dictated that literature should be translated into Classical Armenian. Manoukian will conclude by arguing that this early work broke down social barriers that allowed for the creation of a “national literature” in this form of Armenian later in the century.