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Some years figure more keenly in the collective memory than others. This volume explores how 1968 has come to be perceived in France, Germany, Italy, U.S., Mexico & China, & how various national preoccupations with order, political violence, individual freedom, youth culture & self-expression have been reflected.
This study moves the acclaimed Turkish fiction writer Bilge Karasu (1930–1995) into a new critical arena by examining his poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul’s Beyoğlu, once a cosmopolitan neighborhood called Pera. Karasu established his fame in literary criticism as an experimental modernist, but while themes such as sexuality, gender, and oppression have received critical attention, an essential tenet of Karasu’s oeuvre, the evocation of ethno-cultural identity, has remained unexplored: Excavating Memory brings to light this dimension. Through his non-referential and ambiguous renderings of memory, Karasu gives in his Beyoğlu narratives unique expression to ethno-cultural difference in Turkish literature, and lets through his own repressed minority identity. By using Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical work as a heuristic premise for illuminating Karasu, Gökberk establishes an innovative intercultural framework, which brings into dialogue two representative writers of the twentieth century over temporal and spatial distances.
Challenging the commonplace that suspends migrants between two worlds', this study turns a refreshingly curious eye to complex cultural relations and literary novelties wrought by Turkish migration to Germany. At interpretive and historic crossroads involving dialogue and storytelling, genocide and taboo, and capital and labour in the 1990s. This book illuminates far-reaching imaginative effects that literatures of migration can engender. In critical conversation with Arjun Appadurai, Seyla Benhabib, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, Andreas Huyssen, Dominick LaCapra, Doris Sommer, and many others, Adelson probes history and aesthetics as surprisingly twinned indices of national and global transformation at the millennial turn.
This book is an invitation to rethink our understanding of Turkish literature as a tale of two “others.” The first part of the book examines the contributions of non-Muslim authors, the “others” of modern Turkey, to the development of Turkish literature during the late Ottoman and early republican period, focusing on the works of largely forgotten authors. The second part discusses Turkey as the “other” of the West and the way authors writing in Turkish challenged orientalist representations. Thus this book prepares the ground for a history of literature which uncouples language and religion and recreates the spaces of dialogue and exchange that have existed in late Ottoman Turkey between members of various ethno-religious communities.
This book introduces American audiences to Germany through the perspectives of members of various ethnic groups within the newly unified country and through the mediation of feminist scholars, documenting the artistic contributions to German cultural identity of ten women writers, filmmakers, dancers, and visual artists. The work of these artists is presented in various ways: as an opportunity for Germans to explore their own repressed identities, as a portrayal of the complex histories of cultural change which foreigners bring into Germany, as the work of piecing together a minority identity in Germany, as a portrayal of the marginalization of women in the construction of the nation, and as...
On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul – where the author worked as an undertaker – Dying Abroad offers a moving and powerful account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, vividly illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe.
It would not be an overstatement to say that Cemal Kafadar has transformed the field of Ottoman history. As a result of his pathbreaking books and articles, the field is experiencing a turn within itself as well as recasting its relationship with world history. This volume acts as a tribute to Kafadar and the important interdisciplinary work he has both done and inspired in the field. In line with the intellectual pluralism that Kafadar has cultivated over his career, readers will find a number of articles engaging with a wide range of questions, approaches, perspectives, and sources across Ottoman history. Kafadar's students and friends, individually or in pairs, researched and crafted contributions to this volume with a variety of conceptual premises, theoretical approaches, and interpretive tools to celebrate his thirty years of teaching, research, and mentorship, in addition to the overwhelming generosity of his intellectual and personal engagement.
Literary history, the dominant form of literary scholarship throughout the nineteenth century, is currently recapturing the imaginations of a new generation of scholars eager to focus on the context of literature after a half-century or more of "close" readings of isolated texts. This book represents current thinking on some of the theoretical issues and dilemmas in the conception and writing of literary history, expressed by a group of scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia. They consider afresh a broad range of topics: the role of literary history in "new" societies, the problem of finding a starting point for literary history, the problem of literary classification, problems of ideology, of institutional mediation, periodization, and the attack on literary history.
The rapprochement of anthropology and literary studies, begun nearly fifteen years ago by such pioneering scholars as Clifford Geertz, Edward Said, and James Clifford, has led not only to the creation of the new scholarly domain of cultural studies but to the deepening and widening of both original fields. Literary critics have learned to "anthropologize" their studies—to ask questions about the construction of meanings under historical conditions and reflect on cultural "situatedness." Anthropologists have discovered narratives other than the master narratives of disciplinary social science that need to be drawn on to compose ethnographies. Culture/Contexture brings together for the first...