Gendering East and West: Transnational Politics of Belonging in the Ottoman Empire and France, 1718-1905

Abstract

This dissertation considers how imperial subjects and citizens made claims to political belonging in the period prior to the consolidation of nationalism as an ideology. Focusing on French and Ottoman texts produced between 1718 and 1905 that narrate movements across geographic, political, and cultural borders, my study explores shifting dynamics of political identification and belonging that defy easy geopolitical narratives, either of long-standing confrontation between “East” and “West” or of cosmopolitan coexistence in “contact zones.” I argue that the relational and affective sensibility that characterizes belonging to a political community was cultivated and sustained through cross-cultural exchange: ideas and ideals of religion, geography, ethnicity, and most insistently, masculinity, femininity, and sexuality provided the terms of intelligibility through which imperial belonging was articulated, and imperial governance was defended and contested. This study contributes to the field of comparative political theory by bringing texts from the Ottoman Empire to the forefront of debates about political membership, identity, and belonging. Likewise, the theoretical framework I develop to navigate the historical and philosophical entanglements between Europe and the Middle East, Christianity and Islam, and Orient and Occident in the modern period challenges the primacy of Orientalism in accounting for the political and cultural construction of difference.

My theoretical framework identifies four modalities of political belonging, that is, four distinct linguistic and discursive fields in which gendered, geographic, religious, ethnic, and cultural differences were transformed into political ones. These four modalities - encounter, translation, conversion, and resistance - provide interpretive lenses through which I trace the generative role of what I call a transnational imaginary. Chapter one theorizes encounter, which makes foreign communities an indispensable yet distorting mirror for the communal self, through a comparative reading of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and Mehmed Efendi’s French Embassy Letters. Chapter two turns to Ignatius’ Mouradgea d’Ohsson’s General Sketch of the Ottoman Empire to theorize translation. As a modality of political belonging, translation simultaneously affirms difference between natives and foreigners and highlights their capacity to achieve universal understanding. Chapter three puts the first Ottoman novel Akabi’s Story in conversation with Chateaubriand’s novella Atala and French-Catholic missionary reports from the Ottoman Levant to elucidate conversion as a modality of belonging contingent on the other’s capacity to be radically changed. Chapter four analyzes a series of articles from the Ottoman women’s periodical Ladies’ Own Gazette, where resistance emerges as a modality of political belonging that entails both an identitarian attachment to community and a rejection of its exclusionary practices. A concluding chapter reflects on the sequencing of these modalities, the parallel consolidation of political belonging into nationalism and transnational entanglements into an East/West binary, and the potential contributions of interpretive categories developed in the dissertation to contemporary dilemmas of inclusion, exclusion, and globalization.