This paper reconfigures the formation of literary modernity in the Tanzimat Period as a network of multilateral textual transactions between the Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and French languages. As such, the paper puts itself in dialogue with two scholarly arguments on the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and its literature. First, the current study engages with the contentious position of the Ottoman Empire within post/colonial studies by refocusing the analytical lens not on the questions of whether it was an empire or had colonies, but on the dynamics of imperial mimesis it employed at the time. Linked to the question of Ottoman imperialism is the dominant narrative of the impact of the West and its plaguing disciplinary corollary, the so-called “influence studies.” As a corrective to the Eurocentric framing of the Tanzimat literature as mimicry of the Western novel, this study situates the emergence of novelistic writing within a triangulated economy of textual transactions between Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and French. By highlighting and reinterpreting the points of contact between these cultural fields, this project proposes to reconsider the presence of Arabic literature and language both as a channel of mediation and as an element of rivalry in the Ottoman engagement with “the West.” To that end, the paper focuses on Ahmed Midhat’s Hasan Mellah (Hasan the Sailor, 1874), which is acknowledged by Midhat to be a nazire (emulation) of Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1846), a novel with a polyglot protagonist who reconstructs his post-prison life through a sustained identification with “Sinbad the Sailor” along with plentiful references to the Middle East. Underlining the appeal of narrative familiarity imparted by the intertextual composition of Alexander Dumas’s Monte-Cristo, it offers a close reading of Ahmet Midhat’s Hasan Mellah through the lenses of “mimesis” as interimperial rivalry and “nazire” as a mimetic form of translational practice. Lying at the core of my reading is an idea of multilingual literary economy that explores the role of literary transaction in bringing the Ottoman Empire and its literature into discursive and political equivalence with its various interlocutors. The paper suggests that the heightened Ottoman engagement with “the West” in the nineteenth century evoked memories of an earlier interaction between “the West” and “the East,” as reflected in literary-historical re-enactment of the previous interaction.

In early 1932 F.T. Marinetti, the father of Italian Futurism, journeyed to Istanbul. While there he gave a series of lectures at the Italian Institute of Culture in Beyo?lu, and attended a dinner where he met Peyami Safa, a Turkish conservative novelist sympathetic to Marinetti’s fascist leanings and a devotee of the European avant-garde. This paper will trace the history and legacy of this engagement within Safa’s writing of the mid-1930s. Paying particular attention to Safa’s column “Sanat ve Edebiyat [Art and Literature]” and his novel Bir Tereddüdün Roman? [A Novel of Indecision] serialized in Cumhuriyet newspaper in the summer of 1932, this paper will investigate how Safa translated the rhetoric of Futurism into a critique of Kemalist modernization. Focusing in particular on futurism’s valorization of speed, Safa traces a relationship between literature, velocity, and Westernizing reform, arguing that Turkey’s cultural climate, which urged readers and novelists to catch up with their European counterparts through reading and writing quickly, was wreaking havoc on Turkey’s literary culture. Far from emulating Marinetti’s adoration of speed, Safa instead argues for a slow avant-garde in Turkey. This paper will examine how Safa creates an aesthetics of slow Futurism in his novel to suggest that this little-known point of interaction between Turkish and European literature represents a connected disconnection within avant-garde practices, one which mirrors Turkey’s irregular integration into and relationship with European literary modernism. As such, the Safa-Marinetti moment offers fruitful ground for investigating how such disconnections and translations shaped literary innovation in Turkey.

Nâzim Hikmet is without question one of the best-known literary figures in Turkish history. He is also quite well-known in the successor states to the Soviet Union, where Nâzim lived for approximately seven years in the 1920s, and again for the last twelve years of his life in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While numerous biographies have been written about Nâzim from the perspective of his literary production and the recollection of his friends—all of whom seem to have written a memoir about their experiences with him—these works tend to tell us relatively little about Nâzim’s activities in the Soviet Union. None of the existing studies on Nâzim draw upon the Soviet archives, and indeed most of the biographies of Nâzim tend to draw upon the same sets of memoirs—written by Vâlâ Nureddin, Sevket Süreyya Aydemir, and Zekeriya Sertel. While these memoirs are without question useful, even essential, to the production of biographies about Nâzim, their centrality to the narratives of Nâzim-related biographies leads to a certain amount of repetitiveness in these works. For seven months during the 2016-2017 academic year, I researched in two state archives in Moscow, where I worked extensively with the personal files and other documents pertaining to Nâzim Hikmet, Vâlâ Nureddin, Sevket Süreyya, and other Turkish communists. The documents that I researched began in the early twenties, and for this decade related to his studies at Communist University (where figures like Ho Chi Minh and Deng Xiao-Peng would later study), while later documents from the late 1920s and 1930s discuss Nâzim’s underground work in Turkey and his eventual expulsion from the Turkish Communist Party. Later documents from the 1950s until the 1960s relate to Nâzim’s escape from Turkey to the Soviet Union, Soviet doubts relating to Nâzim’s loyalty due to his earlier expulsion from the party, and Nâz?m’s undertakings as a Soviet “peace ambassador” in the late 1950s. The materials I have researched also provide insights into what it meant to be a Soviet cultural luminary in the late Stalin and early post-Stalin years. As I am currently working on a biography of Nâzim which draws upon these and other (including Ottoman and Turkish) materials, I would like to present my findings within the context of what we know about Nâzim’s life otherwise. To what extent does this new material—which exists nowhere in published form—change our understanding of Nâzim?

This paper will examine the portrayal of the complex relationship between state perpetrators of violence and political victims in Müge Iplikçi’s 2008 novel, Kafdagi [Mount Qaf], and Mehmed Uzun’s 2005 novel, Ask Gibi Aydinlik Ölüm Gibi Karanlik [Light Like Love, Dark Like Death]. Kafdagi, a short international thriller in which a psychological mystery is unraveled, critiques the United States’ post 9/11 rendition program in gripping detail. Ask Gibi Aydinlik Ölüm Gibi Karanlik, a longer, more descriptive novel, relates the life journeys of two Turkish Kurds whose hard-won respective identities as ‘defender of the state’ and ‘freedom fighter’ begin to blur when they are brought face-to-face in a makeshift army prison. Ultimately, Uzun’s novel questions the logic of the Turkish state’s mission to subdue and control its Kurdish citizens, just as ?plikçi’s novel questions the logic of the U.S. government’s mission to render all potential terrorists and informants powerless. Despite differences in their choice of narrative structure, both authors liken the recurring struggles between the state actors and the so-called ‘terrorists’ they depict to an ongoing mythic battle between forces of ‘dark’ and ‘light.’ Whereas the female political victim in Kafdagi ultimately survives her ordeal, thanks to the efforts of an inside American sympathizer; neither the female nor the male protagonist in Ask Gibi Aydinlik Ölüm Gibi Karanlik is able to escape the fate the Turkish state has prescribed for them. My comparative analysis of key scenes from the two novels aims to illustrate why, according to the authors, the ties that bind perpetrator and victim surpass matters of national security and demand re-examination of human psychology. By extending the scholarly debate on trauma and post 9/11 novels to a novel about victims of the Turkish-Kurdish armed conflict, I hope to facilitate a more nuanced discussion of hitherto marginalized literary subject matter.