[Bilimsel Haber] CfP: Minority Literatures of Istanbul: Geography, Politics, and the Question of Literary Orientation

[Onur Inal]

Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 02:14:43 +0300
From: Yağmur Nuhrat <yagmur_nuhrat at brown.edu>

Dear all,

The 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature
Association (ACLA) will take place in Vancouver, Canada March 31-April
3, 2011 (Thursday evening through Sunday noon).

There is one seminar called:

Minority Literatures of Istanbul:Geography, Politics, and the Question
of Literary Orientation.

It is organized by Talar Chahinian, UCLA;USA and Alaettin Carikci,
Leiden University, The Netherlands.
Here's the link for further info: http://www.acla.org/acla2011/?p=653

Below is some brief information about the seminar:

Over the last decade, Nobel prize-winning Orhan Pamuk’s works, as well
as Turkey’s efforts to belong to the European Union, place Turkey, and
particularly its port city Istanbul, at an interesting crossroads
between prescribed categories of East and West, and subsequently
highlight tensions between modernity and tradition, secularism and
Islam.

Although Turkey’s dominant discourse cultivates a Westward-looking
politics, this panel seeks to discuss the question of literary
orientation, by examining minority literatures that have emerged from
the Istanbul/Constantinople of the late Ottoman period to the present.

As a port city simultaneously occupying two continents,
Istanbul/Constantinople has functioned as a point of exchange between
various cultures and a point of congregation for intellectuals of
Turkey’s/Ottoman Empire’s minority groups, such as Armenians, Kurds,
Greeks, and Jews. Although Pamuk and others challenge the state’s
monolithic view of Turkish society by presenting a post-empire hybrid
society, their works charge Turkey with an identity crisis of
dual-belonging that is sometimes interpreted negatively as a state of
confusion. We would like to invite papers that discuss how minority
literatures, either in Turkish or non-Turkish languages, negotiate
between the local, the national, the trans-cultural, and the global.
How have minority voices situated their communal and literary identity
formulations within the dominant narrative framework of Turkey’s
processes of nation-building and move towards capitalism and
modernization? And has Istanbul served as a source of inspiration or a
marker of loss, and thereby a 'lieu de mémoire,' for the cultural
production of those specific ethnic groups?

Please get in touch with Alaettin Çarıkçı for further information:
alekscarikci at gmail.com

All the best,

--

Yağmur Nuhrat
PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology
Box 1921
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912

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