This panel not only brings Anglophone Ottoman/Turkish writing to the forefront, but also rethinks it through new methodological and interpretive frameworks. By bringing these formally and historically diverse case studies into dialogue, the panel repositions Anglophone Ottoman/Turkish literary production as a historically layered archive that foregrounds minority survival, transcultural negotiation, and literary self-fashioning within world literature. While the first two papers foreground minority worlds, local satire, and multilingual strategies of cultural survival, the latter two turn to transnational authorship, fictitious translation, and Anglophone writing as anti-colonial literary self-fashioning.
İlyas Deniz Çınar’s paper, “Humor, Realism, and Historical Satire in Nektaria Anastasiadou’s A Recipe for Daphne,” explores how comedy functions not as a deflection of collective trauma but as a historiographic strategy. Through close readings of culinary memory, minority afterlives, and satire, the paper examines how humor generates a form of minority counter-narration within the context of Istanbul’s Greek Orthodox Rum community, while also interrogating the nostalgic recuperation of Ottoman multiculturalism.
Nora Bairamian’s paper shifts the discussion to the Ottoman-Armenian provincial world by examining the use of English in Tlkatintsi’s short fiction as a marker of estrangement, migration, and local satire. Through close readings of stories such as “Gulig and the Teacher,” the paper demonstrates how strategically inserted English phrases function as signs of otherness. By foregrounding the neglected Eastern provincial world of Kharpert, the paper expands the panel’s understanding of Anglophone Ottoman literary production beyond metropolitan centers and into multilingual minority vernaculars shaped by migration and imperial encounter.
Elif Işık’s paper, “The American Novel That Wasn’t: Nihal Yeğinobalı’s Pseudo-Translations as Examples of Turkish-American Literature,” turns to a remarkable case of fictitious translation and pseudonymous authorship. By examining Yeğinobalı’s “American” novels written under the male pseudonym Vincent Ewing, the paper asks how a Turkish woman writer could successfully inhabit American literary authorship and how literary identity moves across the binaries of Turkish and American through pseudo-translation, reception, and paratext.
Bahar İzmir’s paper on Halide Edib Adıvar’s Inside India turns to one of the most significant moments in Ottoman/Turkish women’s Anglophone writing as an anti-colonial intervention. Focusing on Adıvar’s Jamia Millia lectures and their transformation into the 1937 English-language travelogue and political treatise Inside India, the paper argues that Adıvar strategically mobilizes English as a lingua franca of resistance rather than as a concession to imperial discourse. By tracing how her prose mediates solidarities between Turkey and anti-colonial Indian intellectuals, the paper shows how Adıvar’s Anglophone corpus articulates a transnational “Third Way” between Western Orientalism and the hyper-secularizing impulses of the early Turkish Republic.
Taken together, these papers, presented by speakers from four different home institutions across three countries (two from the United States, one from the United Kingdom, and one from Turkey), bring a highly diverse range of voices and theoretical frameworks to demonstrate that Anglophone Ottoman/Turkish literary production is not a marginal or episodic phenomenon, but a historically layered and formally diverse archive that reshapes debates in world literature, Anglophone studies, minority studies, and transnational/transcultural writing.
Each speaker will be allotted 15 minutes, allowing ample time for discussion at the end.
Thank you for your consideration.
References
Brinks, E. 2016. Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870–1920. New York: Routledge.
Bucknor, M. A., & Donnell, A. 2011. The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature. New York: Routledge.
Doh, E. F. 2014. Anglophone-Cameroon Literature: An Introduction. USA: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Hout, S. 2012. Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in The Diaspora. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Malreddy, P. K., & Schulze-Engler, F. 2024. Mapping World Anglophone Studies: English in a World of Strangers. New York: Routledge.
Marx, J. 2012. Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Santesso, M. E. 2013. Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Udoinwang, D. E., & Tsaaior, J. T. 2022. Autobiography, Memory and Nationhood In Anglophone Africa. New York: Routledge.