The goal of this panel is to provide a forum in which to address the link between modernity and vision in Middle Eastern literatures as it bears on the questions of power, body politics, and secularization. Sight is a historically privileged sense, which manifests itself not only in the ways in which it facilitates and dominates daily life, but also how it mediates conceptual thinking and language. This significance of vision shifts in the modern era when it gets tightly connected to modern practices of governmentality and subjection. The modern regimes of visibility postulate the exercise of imperial/national power on the all-seeing capacities of modern governments and the submission of subjects under its gaze to one predetermined frame. In critical theory, today, we discuss the male gaze, the imperial gaze, the Orientalist gaze, and the white gaze, all privileged positions of sight that frame their others in their own terms.

It is possible to trace this shift in the histories of modernity in the Middle East. Apart from the instrumentalization of visibility for governance and subjection, vision takes on a different meaning in the emerging idea of world-as-picture. As Timothy Mitchell argues (2020), the world-as-picture is significant to understand that modernity is concerned with image-making, spatialization, and serialization and that it generates a specific regime of representation rooted in continual presence and contemporaneity. In response to these imperatives, modern cultural production (literary, poetic, or visual) aims to replace what is missing, absent, or immaterial with a representation (a text/image/copy/replica). Without doubt, this act of representation is already undermined by a constant sense of disjuncture and indeterminacy. In the case of Middle Eastern cultures, the rift between image (what is represented) and reality (what is seen) is laden with further ideological significance, since the act of representation also has to work against the already-established images of these societies in Orientalist scholarship as indolent, mystical, feminine, or decadent cultures.

This panel topic has its conceptual roots in this approach to modernity as a regime of visibility and presence with implications for non-Western political and literary structures and the conditions of their entry into international political and literary arenas. Taymaz Pour Mohammad will set the stage for our comparative exploration of vision in Persian, Turkish, and Arabic contexts. Mohammad traces Persian pessimism or the proclivity to see the evil in modern Persian literature, as it stems from the confluence of two stands of thought, one local (through the re-evaluation of Omar Khayyam) and the other global (through the translational reception of literary existentialisms of Kafka and Sartre). Mohammad ties the dominance of the pessimistic vision in modern Persian literature to cultural melancholia generated by early twentieth-century modernizing developments in Iran. Since similar sentiments and expressions of melancholia can be traced in Turkish and Arabic literatures, Mohammad’s exploration of melancholic pessimism has validity beyond Persian modernity. It eventually speaks to the underlying unease with modernity and its representational regime.

Working from this connection, Seda Arıkan will take up the problematics of vision from a gendered perspective. Focusing on Adalet Ağaoğlu, a well-known and widely-read Republican writer, Seda Arıkan will examine the representation of “new woman” in Adalet Ağaoğlu’s trilogy, Dar Zamanlar [Narrow Times], which covers the years of urbanization, military coups, economic turmoil, and women’s movement between 1938-1980. Building on Muhammad’s presentation about the literary and philosophical sources of melancholic pessimism, Arıkan’s reading will focus more on vision as a modern practice of subjection and explore how it shapes the construction of ideal citizens in the Turkish context.

Finally, Joy Mazahreh will connect our discussion of the visions of modernity with the question of secularization in the Middle East. Specifically, Mazahreh will talk about Youssef Ziedan’s novel Azazeel, which takes up the problem of sectarianism in early fifth century in the region that today covers Egypt, Syria, Israel and Turkey. Taking the novel’s protagonist, a Coptic monk, and his ethical vision, Mazahreh will argue for “middleness”—also an Islamic dictum for moral behavior—as an alternative vision to religious and ethnic divides in the region.

While having common threads, all three papers approach vision from a different angle. All together, they explore the prevalent sense of pessimism that modernity creates for modernizing societies, the gendered structures of invisibility embedded into the nation-state, and the temporal (both time-wise and secular) politics of modernity as a political vision. In doing so, they complement each other and showcase the complexity and expansiveness of vision as an analytical framework to approach modernity in the Middle East.