The methodological tools that literary studies has developed to account for the relationships between imperialism and literature have not been entirely inclusive of imperial states which do not neatly fit into the empire/colony model of Western European colonialism. As both an empire in its own right and the site of increasing European colonial intervention, the Ottoman Empire during the rise of the Ottoman novel disrupts the neat binary configuration of power which structure many postcolonial theoretical interventions. Therefore, not only are postcolonial literary critical frameworks relatively absent from studies of late Ottoman literature, but Ottoman literature is also missing within postcolonial studies. This paper begins from the following premises: the tools of postcolonial literary theory are crucial for enriching understanding of the ways in which imperial dynamics are given narrative and social-moral power within the Ottoman novel. At the same time, addressing the gaps in postcolonial literary theory’s relevancy for empires beyond Western Europe enhances scholarly understanding of the relationship between imperiality and literary production on a global scale. In attending to these premises, this paper first constructs a methodological framework for postcolonial Ottoman literary criticism through surveying work done on Ottoman colonialism about the late 19th century alongside recent developments in postcolonial literary theory. In the second half of the paper, I then apply these theoretical frameworks to Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s 1875 novel, Felatun Bey and Rakım Efendi. Through a series of close readings, this paper reveals the extent to which the rise of the Ottoman novel participates in the writing of empire and shores up internal moral and social values which organize and reinforce perceptions of late Ottoman imperiality. What becomes clear through these readings is that Ottoman imperialism in this period encompassed both an attempt to internally consolidate the imperial practices of the Ottoman state and negotiate its power relative to other imperial states, particularly those of Britain, France and Russia. These inter-imperial negotiations are highly visible in the narrative structure of the novel.

In the 1950s, Turkey's literary world was shocked by a radical new poetic movement: İkinci Yeni, or the "Second New." Associated with the poets Ece Ayhan, Edip Cansever, Cemal Süreya, and Turgut Uyar among others, the Second New produced formally complex poetry that flouted conventional rules of grammar, syntax, and even spelling. Many literary critics in Turkey were actively hostile to this new brand of poetic modernism. Attempting to make sense of it, influential literati like Asım Bezirci called the Second New a new divan poetry, referring to the courtly poetry of the Ottoman Empire that was heavily based on the prosody and symbolısm developed in classical Arabic and Persian poetry. This presentation analyzes Second New poetry and the literary debates it elicited in relation to the complex legacy and afterlives of Ottoman literature. The political reform movements of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic were strongly invested in literary questions. Pro-reform writers and intellectuals rejected what they saw as the obscure, elitist, and decadent five-hundred-year tradition of imperial poetry and instead promoted a folk-based and ethnically demarcated form of nationalist poetry. This literary commitment to clarity, realism, and populism began to break down with the appearance of the Second New in the 1950s. Seeking to slander this new modernist current, intellectuals labeled it divan, which had become a pejorative term in nationalist literary discourse. While the experimental poetry produced by Second New poets had very little to do with the quantitative verse forms, mystical symbolism, rose- and nightingale-filled imagery of Ottoman courtly poetry, this paper will explore moments where they did explicitly engage with taboo elements of the imperial legacy. Ece Ayhan’s gnomic prose poems of the 1950s and 1960s focused on the multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, and bohemian neighborhoods of Istanbul. His work not only explored social, religious, and sexual ‘Others’ of the city’s underworld, it dug into the Ottoman and even Byzantine past. Similarly, Turgut Uyar’s 1970 book Divan actively played with poetic forms associated with Ottoman poetry, such as the ghazal, while using them to explore themes related to modern life, technology, consumption, and the city. While critics who described the Second New as a revival of divan poetry were seeking mainly to discredit them, this essay’s exploration of their poetry shows that the Second New ways indeed grappling with the afterlives of the imperial past in ways that sought to trouble nationalist orthodoxies.

Focusing on the novels of Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem and Ahmet Midhat Efendi, this paper argues that the craving for linguistic mastery in the late Ottoman cultural landscape was entwined with a performance of masculinity that enabled the homosocial imagination of an imperial identity. Registered in Ottoman Turkish fictional texts from the nineteenth century is an anxiety over multilingual potency, which —as an explicitly gendered phenomenon— communicates imperially suggestive sexual frustrations and ambitions. The trope of a multilingual charmer, in particular, helps eroticize imperial masculinity and redefine domination and conquest in the form of an intimacy. The creation of male-dominated intimacies in these narratives hinges on a demonstrated command of linguistic and cultural hybridity that is cashed in toward the fantasy of a geo-economically potent Ottoman Turkish imperial sovereignty. At the core of these representations, then, is an eroticized validation of the imperialist impulse to conquer and colonize. As such, fictions from the era instrumentalize heteronormative intimacies (founded in and through the mastery of multilingualism and multiculturalism) to facilitate the imagination of a global Ottoman Turkish imperial sovereignty.

A defining imperial legacy of the Ottoman imperiality for its successor state, the Republic of Turkey, was the Armenian genocide and its denial. From the 1920s onward, the shadow of a terrible crime against humanity and the fact that the perpetrators were unpunished (that they could “get away with the crime”) shaped the future roles of the communities as a code of (un)ethic in the society. Muslim Turks re-established their “colonizer” status as the “autochthonous nation” of the country, whereas “the natives”, namely Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Assyrians, were pushed out of their homes, forced to leave the country, or else remained as unequal and unwanted citizens of the new republic, constantly victimized through denial. In the case of Armenian survivors of the genocide, once autonomous Armenian millet of the Ottoman polity was reduced to a mere “minority” in the nation-state, while they strived to survive in a hostage situation in the midst of denial, silence, and invisibility. Zaven Biberyan, born in 1921 in Kadıköy (İstanbul), was a critical Armenian intellectual and a great novelist, who resisted genocide denialism and struggled for the equality of non-Muslims in Turkey from the 1940s to the 1970s. Biberyan’s literary works from the 1960s portray the Armenian existence in the aftermath of the genocide and describe different forms of structural violence targeting non-Muslims both at “normal” times and when routine relations collapse during massacres and pogroms. As Veena Das puts it, those who lived through catastrophic moments of violence, must also face the future. Ahead of them was a terrifying task of continuing their lives among those who have been known to be actively involved in acts of murder, rape, and vandalism. Zaven Biberyan had clearly pointed out that the genocidal violence was not over, it was continuously reproduced. Biberyan delineates political pressures faced by Armenians on a routine basis; anti-Armenian attacks in the press, which stereotyped them as internal enemies; the normality and banality of racist attacks; and the complete silence surrounding it all. This paper discusses his three novels, The Slut (Lıgırdadzı, Armenian, 1959; Yalnızlar, Turkish, 1966), Penniless Lovers (Angudi Siraharnerı, Armenian, 1962), and The Sunset of the Ants (Mırçünneru Verçaluysı, Armenian, serialized, 1970), within the context of post-genocidal habitus of Armenians in Turkey.