The workshop explores textual circulations and exchange, enterprises of translation, migration of knowledge and documentations of travels that complicate the current institutional (national) divisions between languages, time periods, and geographical areas. We focus on the transition period from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century that witnessed the demise of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, alongside the Russian, the German and the British, and the formation of new nation-states in the East of the Mediterranean, stretching from Galicia, via the Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant, North Africa, West to South Asia.
We wish to develop a critical perspective on the imperial past in view of the current limits of the national frame: While we are attentive to the hierarchies and flows of Empire that we do not romanticize, we would like to revisit and examine narrative and archival sources of that era in order to envision possible affiliations, entanglements and collectivities – potentials for thought that is directed towards the future of the people in and of East of the Mediterranean. We thus look at entangled trajectories of persons, languages and texts as we adopt different, comparative frameworks, such as the Mediterranean, as well as the Balkans, the Levant, post-Ottoman Palestine, Turkey, the Arab world or the Middle East. As we pay attention to entanglements in and of the imperial past, we also try to understand how the shadows, ghosts and after-lifes of empire – shade and preserve potentialities for our present moment.
The workshop will host literary scholars and historians who work on different languages and literatures, including Arabic, Armenian, Turkish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Greek, French or German, while engaging imperial and post-imperial periods. The participants are invited to present their research on minor, marginal or common texts, persons or issues that reflect translational and re-translational effects of the imperial era or its after-life as a substance for solidarity, affiliation, and friendship.
The workshop is convened by C. Ceyhun Arslan (Koç University / EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2023/24) and Galili Shahar (Marcel Reich-Ranicki Chair in German Literature, Tel Aviv University).
This is an internal workshop. If you are interested in attending, please send an e-mail to eume(at)trafo-berlin.de.
