World Literature and the Ottoman Institution of Slavery

This seminar aims to bring together critical reflections on literary representations, from across continents and centuries, of enslavement in the Ottoman Empire. It will spotlight the place of the Ottoman institution of slavery in global configurations of literary genres and forms. At the same time, it seeks to foster a dialogue between varied articulations of anti-slavery imaginaries from within and outside the geocultural boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Papers in this seminar are thus encouraged to pursue a rethinking of globalist frameworks in literary criticism by drawing attention to the transcontinental scope of the Ottoman practices of slavery and slave trade; that is, contributors are invited to reflect on the implications of this cross-cultural and multi-racial form of systemic violence for the constitution of World Literature at large.

In calling attention to the historical actualities and legacies of Ottoman slavery and slave trade in and beyond modern-day Turkey, the seminar takes its cue from recent historical scholarship that does not mystify the conditions and actors of this institutional violence. It works to counter the striking absence of research on this matter in the field of World Literature, wherein enslaved bodies in the Ottoman Empire have often been treated as metaphors of a broadly conceived sociopolitical oppression, or vehicles of expression for Orientalist desires. The seminar will instead focus on the following points, without limiting, however, its discussions to them:
 
– Depictions of Ottoman slavery in literatures from around the globe
– Narratives of enslavement in peripheralized languages of the Ottoman Empire
– Testimonies from enslaved individuals: archive, witnessing and memory
– Abolitionist discourses
– Racism and racial capitalism
– Intersections between genres, forms and the economies of slavery