The Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923 was the first internationally legitimated project of forced deracination in modern history. Nearly 1.5 million Anatolian Christians were uprooted to Greece, while nearly half a million Muslims of Greece were uprooted to Turkey, “unmixing the Near East" through ethnic partition. Amidst the experience of mass ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, whose stories were cited and whose were slighted? This talk aims to 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. Drawing from my forthcoming book Literature’s Refuge, I will bring together two unlikely interlocutors: the Tuḫfe-i Şānī be zebān-ı yūnānī (Şani's Gift in the Greek Tongue), an Ottoman-era work of Arabic-script Greek vernacular poetry, and Mehmet Yashin's Σηνηρδησ̇ι Σαατλερ (The Deported Hours), a contemporary Cypriot novel written partially in Greek-script Turkish.
Speaker: William Stroebel (Comparative Literatures and Modern Greek, University of Michigan)
