Comparative Methodologies: Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape

Lunchtime Talk: William Stroebel, Department of Modern Greek University of Michigan

What are the internal borders of comparative literature and how do they shape literary histories and the disciplinary lay of the land? The present talk will focus on the edges of Europe and the modern Middle East, which was born a century ago, when the Ottoman Empire was carved up into racialized borders. The Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923-1925 was the final nail in the Empire's coffin, uprooting and swapping nearly two million Christians and Muslims between Greece and West Asia. What stories can we salvage from this devastating history, and how can we retell them today? The answer depends in large part on what we count as stories, who gets to record them, and how we curate them within the academy and commercial publishing. In both Greece and Turkey, philologists and publishers defined modern literature by picking apart, extracting, reformatting, or dispossessing refugee and diasporic texts across a racialized borderscape — a gray zone of semi-inclusion and semi-exclusion. Drawing from his book Literature's Refuge, William Stroebel will recover something of the rich refugee literatures that fell through the cracks of the modern border regime, straddling Greek Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam, Greek-script, Arabic-script, and Latin-script literary traditions.

RSVP For William Stroebel Talk HERE

Workshop at 4pm: Materialist Methods for Comparative Research (please email Harry Carter (harrycar [at] stanford.edu (harrycar[at]stanford[dot]edu)) for the pre-reading.