Postcoloniality, the Ottoman Past, and the Middle East Present

Abstract

During the last decade, the postcolonial approach has become influential in the humanities and the social sciences. Tracing its own historical origin to interaction with Western European modernity, it focuses on contemporary power inequality, which it intends to eliminate by demonstrating the connection between power and knowledge. Hence, this approach not only puts the present in conversation with the past but also poses power inequality as the analytical lens through which to approach states and societies. In the last decades, a number of scholars working on the Middle East have adopted the postcolonial approach. In this review essay, I initially discuss its application in the study of the region and then contextualize eight recent works within that framework.

Introduction

“…The European Community/Union is often seen as a new kind of actor which has emerged from the ashes of the Second World War, a departure from its temporal "other" in the past (Waever, 1996). However, from the viewpoint of the Middle East, through first an "anti-colonial" (Mohamedou, 2018;Gani, 2019;Salem, 2020) and then a "postcolonial" lens (Azeez, 2019;Ball and Mattar, 2018;Kandiyoti, 2002;Göçek, 2012;Bilgin, 2018), both hope and doubt have been shed on this development. Have relations really changed substantially, or is there actually more continuity than usually assumed?…”

Ottoman transcultural memories: Introduction

“…That is, the Ottoman Empire was both an empire made up of difference and also a different formation of empire, with difference (diversity) at its institutional heart. Furthermore, even while we do not jettison them completely but instead think about their overlap and complicity, we choose transcultural to investigate Ottoman memories over other, related, but not reducible, terms, which have been variously evoked in relation to the Ottoman Empire: postcolonial (Aksan, 2008, Göçek, 2012), orientalism (Deringil, 2011; Makdisi, 2002; Said, 1978), co-existence (Bryant, 2016; Doumanis, 2013) and cosmopolitan . The latter especially has been applied by historians to the Ottoman Empire, although perhaps of all terms for cultural encounters most controversially (Freitag, 2014).…”