The Mediterranean has often been studied as the invention of nineteenth-century Western European scientists, philosophers, and writers, who described the sea as a coherent body of water with a unique history. Their works may regurgitate more institutionalized and fixed accounts of the Mediterranean that, for example, view the Mediterranean as the cradle of European civilization. In contrast, the authors I study made sense of themselves as they discussed “their Mediterranean,” i.e., their vision of its history that undermined Orientalist accounts of the sea.
The authors I analyze for my book spent the first years of their lives in the Ottoman Empire, and most of them eventually found themselves living under new nation-states of the Middle East and North Africa. These authors had a relatively non-hierarchical relationship with the Mediterranean; therefore, their writings attributed to the Mediterranean geopolitical divisions and historical turning points that we do not see in mainstream accounts of the basin. Unlike more contemporary authors like Radwa Ashour (1946–2014), they often did not openly resist and sometimes have even internalized Orientalist and exclusionist perspectives on the Mediterranean. At the same time, my book argues that their writings give us a basis from which we can criticize more institutionalized and Orientalist assumptions about the sea.
ASSOZ. PROF. DR. C. CEYHUN ARSLAN
CURRICULUM VITAE
Dr. Arslan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University and Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Saarland University. He will also soon be the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures.
His publications have appeared in journals and edited volumes, such as Middle Eastern Literatures (2016); Comparative Literature Studies (2017); Journal of Mediterranean Studies (2019); Sea of Literatures: Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature (2023); and Utopian Studies (2024).
His first book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, has been published by Edinburgh University Press, and he is working on his second book project, tentatively entitled Becoming Mediterranean: The Sea Reconfigured in Arabic, French, and Turkish Literatures.
