[Discussion] CFP: Re-Framing Colonial Mimicry: American Missionaries in the Ottoman Near East (3/15/03; MLA '03)

[gonul@bilkent.edu.tr]

From: Goffman, Carolyn McCue <cgoffman@bsu.edu>
Subject: CFP: Re-Framing Colonial Mimicry: American Missionaries in the Ottoman Near East (3/15/03; MLA '03)

CFP: Re-Framing Colonial Mimicry: American Missionaries in the Ottoman 
Near East (3-15-03; MLA '03)

Seeking papers for a MLA 2003 Special Session panel exploring the 
rhetoric of the American missionary in the Middle East from the late 
nineteenth-century to the First World War. Among American missionaries 
in the late Ottoman Empire, the narrative of the secular "nation" came 
to replace overtly Protestant proselytization. Many American 
missionaries were educators, teaching students from the various ethnic, 
linguistic, and religious groups present in the Ottoman Empire. 
Americans resident in the Ottoman territories produced memoirs, magazine 
articles, and "histories" of the peoples of the Near East that 
racialized religious and language groups and rhetorically isolated them 
from each other, even as the Americans promoted the idea of a 
homogeneous democratic "nation" similar to the United States. Thus, in a 
process that re-frames Homi Bhabha's model of mimicry, the American 
rhetoric seems to promote Western-style democracy without allowing its 
fulfillment.

Papers welcomed concerning the American ideas of "nation" and "race" at 
home or abroad as reflected in missionary involvement in the Ottoman 
territories, especially as they relate to events in pre-World War One 
Armenian communities and/or to nationalist movements in the Balkans, the 
Middle East, and the Turkish Republic.

Please send inquiries and/or a brief (up to 200 word) abstract and vitae 
by March 15 to  <mailto:cgoffman@bsu.edu> cgoffman@bsu.edu, or:

Carolyn Goffman, Department of English, Ball State University, Muncie, 
IN 47306.