This session brings together critical reflections on literary representations of enslavement in the Ottoman Empire. It spotlights the influence of the Ottoman institution of slavery on the global configurations of literary genres and forms. At the same time, it seeks to foster a dialogue between varied articulations of anti-slavery imaginaries emerging from outside and within the geocultural boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Papers included in this session thus pursue a rethinking of globalist frameworks in literary criticism by drawing attention to the transcontinental scope of the Ottoman practices of slavery and slave trade; they invite the audience to reflect on the implications of this cross-cultural and multi-racial form of systemic violence for the constitution of global abolitionist letters at large by focusing on actual and figurative travels to the Ottoman Empire.

The three papers included in this panel all scrutinize, for purposes of coherence, texts from the Anglophone writing of the long eighteenth century. Their shared objective is to examine whether the Ottoman Empire, either as a material geocultural site or a land of fantasies, influences abolitionist visions in global Anglophone literature. Whereas each presentation offers detailed discussions of Orientalist fabulations, the session redirects the critical gaze from conventional analyses of “the Western self versus the Eastern other” toward a fresh rethinking of the potentially abolitionist affects of such representations. Each paper is allowed 17-20 minutes to ensure that the panel has at least 20 minutes left for further discussion and questions.

The first speaker, Angelina Del Balzo, contextualizes Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko within English stage depictions of Ottoman slavery in the Oriental tragedy, and how that context changes as Oroonoko becomes a crucial text in British abolitionist discourse. In Behn’s Oroonoko and its stage adaptation, Del Balzo proposes, the Ottoman Empire’s sexual slavery in the harem structures the depiction of Oroonoko and Imoinda’s enslavement. Portraying chattel slavery in the Americas through the generic tropes of plays set in the Ottoman Empire produces the dissonance of the white Imoinda, a rare moment when the production of whiteness is made visible as modern ideas of race and gender develop constituently. Del Balzo finds that this historical development is clearest when Black American actor Ira Aldridge made his Royal Coburg Theatre debut in The Revolt of Surinam; or the Slave’s Revenge, a more explicitly abolitionist adaptation of Southerne’s adaptation.

Ayse Circir expands on Del Balzo’s discussion with a paper that explores the role Ottoman forms of enslavement play in Anglophone imaginations of female captivity and abolitionism through an analysis of Isaac Bickerstaff’s The Sultan: or, A Peep into the Seraglio, A Farce in Two Acts. Circir argues that Bickerstaff’s Orientalist farce prompts a critical reconsideration of 18th century British attitudes toward the institution of slavery in the Ottoman Empire. The Sultanportrays the harem as an imagined place of sensual delights and captivity, and yet, the English female captive Roxalana corrects and educates the Ottoman sultan Solyman who then releases all other female captives of the harem. Circir suggests that The Sultan, while adding to the archives of familiar Orientalist imaginary, also articulates an abolitionist imagination, one that is charged with tensions around gender and imperial identity.

Arif Camoglu’s reading of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative centers on the abolitionist’s visit to the Ottoman city, Smyrna (Izmir in contemporary Turkey). In a critical spirit similar to the one informing the interpretations of Circir and Del Balzo, Camoglu shows that Equiano’s recurring emphases on Turkish hospitality point to a broader, albeit overlooked historical-geographical grid that confirms how significant a location the Ottoman Empire is in the global map of abolitionist imaginary. By alluding to Smyrna repeatedly not in mere figurative terms but also, and more importantly, in its spatial reality, Equiano ends up situating the Ottoman Empire itself as a decisive spot in the transatlantic route of abolitionism. As such, Camoglu suggests, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, when read alongside other slave narratives and captivity accounts, prompts a wider reckoning with the neglected Ottoman influence on the shaping of transcontinental abolitionist discourses.