This paper explores how the trope of feminine visibility was used in two texts from the 1720s, Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed Efendi’s Fransa Sefâretnâmesi (French Embassy Letters) and Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters). Scholars of early eighteenth century Ottoman society have suggested that in this period (the so-called “Tulip Era”) public displays of openness, consumption, and pleasure replaced the more common displays of piety, loyalty to the Sultan, and of obedience to imperial power. Similarly, scholars of French history have highlighted the changing practices of consumption and royal power. These changes also brought about an increasing attentiveness to the ways in which other political orders were organized and legitimized. Focusing specifically on these two contemporaneous yet generically distinct texts, the paper argues that gendered images and tropes were key components how ideas of “otherness” were formulated in, and circulated across, Ottoman and French contexts. Further, the paper suggests that despite differences in genre and local sociopolitical contexts, Mehmet Efendi and Montesquieu used similarly gendered tropes to articulate what they deemed to be incommensurable differences between the so called “East” and “West.” At a time when the contemporary political meanings that are often attached to these two geographic markers were still in the making, both authors used the contrast between the “publicly visible French woman” and the “inherently private and emotional Eastern woman” to make normative claims about the organization of political power in the Ottoman Empire, and France, respectively. Moreover, they contributed to the emergence of a transnational imaginary in which the figure of the “silent and docile Eastern woman” came to mark the limits of politics. In order to fully explore the political work that representations of femininity and otherness are doing in both texts, the paper first looks at the local and transnational historical context of the period in which French Embassy Letters and Persian Letters were produced. Then, it turns to the distinct generic conventions of each text in order to elucidate some of the formal differences and overlaps between Mehmed Efendi’s and Montesquieu’s writing. Finally, it offers close readings of the two texts, and suggests that while French Embassy Letters and Persian Letters attached contradictory values to the figure of the “silent and docile Eastern woman,” both texts mobilized this figure to mark the boundaries of the political.

In Ottoman studies scholars have prevailingly utilized petitions as a source to identify the experiences and social history of subaltern groups. I use petitions to decode the cultural world of locals in the Ottoman eastern provinces. The history and voices of this region have not entered Ottoman historiography. Furthermore, despite the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional setting of Eastern Anatolia in the nineteenth-century, Kurdish and Armenian insular national historiographies have dominated the field. To break out of a history of difference I examine aspects that connected the various ethno-confessional communities. I use representation as an analytical tool in reading Ottoman and Armenian petitions sent from the eastern provinces of Van and Erzurum to the Armenian Patriarchate and the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. With such an analysis I point out the shared discursive strategies with which locals contested their cultural boundaries. The proposed paper will examine petitions that particularly deal with marriage and argue that in the Ottoman Empire between the 1840s and 1870s marriage provided a space in which boundaries of gender, communal customs and identities were negotiated. Crossing such socio-cultural boundaries signified contesting positions of power. Singling out phrases and concepts that repeat throughout these petitions I delineate patterns in the language of the petitioners. Linking the language appearing in texts produced across ethno-confessional divisions I will ask how the cultural worlds of communities that thus far historians have presented to be unconnected, intertwined. I ask what connected the ethno-confessional communities that have overwhelmingly been represented as different both in twentieth-century historiography and nineteenth-century sources? How common socio-political processes and power dynamics engendered particular discourses of difference? The proposed study will contribute to Ottoman studies in that it will provide a view of popular culture in the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to elite culture, which has dominated the academic field.

Museum exhibits present a particular narrative of history to a public audience. In recent years the various curatorial narratives about “Islamic Art” have been hotly debated. In order to understand many of the current issues in the field, scholars have looked back to the origins of the Islamic art exhibition and the first narratives presented therein in cities such as Stockholm, London, Munich, and Istanbul. Some scholars have suggested that the chief premise of Islamic art exhibitions in Europe was to represent the private collectors’ tastes or to offer elites an opportunity to experience their exotic fantasies of the East firsthand, rather than telling the story of the civilizations or distant cultures from which the objects came. Likewise, in Ottoman Turkey, carefully selected artifacts and their juxtaposition in the first imperial museums say more about contemporary society and speak to the Ottoman court’s motivations for establishing such institutions. While examination of the historical contexts of early exhibitions aids in our understanding of the origins of the field and how it developed over time, further inquiry is necessary to conceptualize their representational modalities. What were the intended curatorial narratives of these exhibitions and how were they implemented in the gallery? What kind of experience was the museumgoer meant to have? What were they meant to take away? The curator has to understand both the objects and his audience in order to present a history comprehensible to a modern public and provide viewers an entry point for understanding distant pasts and exotic cultures. In these early exhibitions of Islamic art in Europe and Ottoman Turkey, the gallery space and configuration of objects served to represent (re-present) a lived history, which was graspable only through material objects and constructed environments. Regardless of their historical veracity, these curated environments sought to recreate a world both mysterious and coherent, cognitively distant yet tangibly close. By harnessing the power of objects to transform space and transcend time, these early exhibitions re-present history and define tradition for their “modern/izing” audiences in a profound and tangible way.

Comparisons that bring together the Middle East and Europe abound, but these comparisons all too often (and sometimes inadvertently) emphasize difference and insufficiency, especially by pinning the terms of comparison against each other, where Europe frequently masquerades as a model for the Middle East. This paper will focus on a literary comparison between twentieth century Turkey and Spain, and using this comparison, will explore whether and how we can think about the literary intersections between Europe and the Middle East without perpetuating East/West binaries, or hierarchical comparisons. As this paper will argue, the field of World Literature and its premises are especially appropriate for these more “equitable” comparisons, because they allow us to look at how ideas and themes circulate between different contexts with limited interaction. In this sense, World Literature might be able to move us away from comparisons that are formulated through a center/periphery, or colony/postcolony relationship, and towards new frameworks that emerge via thematic threads. The paper will focus particularly on two works by Orhan Pamuk and Juan Goytisolo, who both self-consciously use Middle East-Europe comparisons to challenge and subvert them. While Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Kar presents a world in which even the habitants of a small city in Eastern Turkey, cut off from the world by a snow storm, act and talk with a persistent image of Europe in mind, Juan Goytisolo’s 1995 novel El sitio de los sitios creates a world in which the borders between Europe and the Middle East are very much porous and indefinite, confusing the characters and the readers themselves, who nevertheless try to retain a distinction between the two. In both cases, the result is a dismantling of the ideas of a fixed Europe or Middle East, and consequently a productive complication of comparisons between the two. Using Sibel Irzik's notion of the "self-conscious critique of the allegorical impulse," the comparison of these authors will attempt to offer a comparative framework that purposefully moves away from a hierarchical model of the Middle East and Europe.