Learning Turkish

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (3) ◽  
pp. 763-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Spitzer ◽  
Tülay Atak
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Turkish Language

Emigration is translation. Written by Leo Spitzer in 1934, “Learning Turkish” offers a glimpse into the historical circumstances of his and other German academics' exile in Istanbul—an exile that plays a foundational role in comparative literature, as Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, and Emily Apter have argued. Spitzer's attempt to analyze the characteristics of the Turkish language while that language was transforming amplifies recent critical attempts to understand “modern Turkey's nation-based and state-directed poiesis” (Yaeger 11). Bridging the gap between exile in Istanbul and the modern Turkish language, “Learning Turkish” introduces complexity to contemporary paradigms of global comparatism and identifies symptoms of literary studies' relocation to the context of a new nation-state; the article exemplifies the complicity between local nationalisms and cultural imperialisms and illuminates, on a personal level, how linguistic estrangement becomes a way of negotiating the experience of deportation, of emigration, and of the foreignness of adoptive cultures for Spitzer.

International Human Rights, Religious Pluralism and the Future of Chieftaincy in Ghana

Exchange ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abamfo Atiemo
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Religious Commitment ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Religious Reasons ◽  
Customary Practices

AbstractA revolutionary development that resulted from Africa's experience of colonialism was the emergence of the nation-state made up of previously separate ethnic states. By the end of the colonial period the rulers of these ethnic states — the chiefs — had lost most of their real political and judicial powers to the political leaders of the new nation-states. But in spite of the loss of effective political power the chiefs continued to wield moral influence over members of their ethnic groups. The limited reach of the nation-state in the post-colonial era has also meant a dependence on the chiefs, in many cases, for aspects of local governance. This, for example, is the case of Ghana. However, in the modern context of religious pluralism the intimate bond between the chiefs and the traditional religion exacerbates tension in situations of conflict between people's loyalty to the traditional state and their religious commitment. In some cases, chiefs invoke customary laws in attempt to enforce sanctions against individuals who refuse to observe certain customary practices for religious reasons. But this has implications for the human rights of citizens. This article discusses the implications of this situation for the future of chieftaincy as well as prospects for the protection of the human rights of citizens who for religious reasons choose to stay away from certain communal customary practices.

Against Global Literary Studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Edmond
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
The World

Abstract Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison. As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: EAST AND WEST STUDIES

2021 ◽  
Vol 02 (09) ◽  
pp. 8-14
Author(s):  
Aziza Komilovna Akhmedova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal ◽  
The Ideal

The article analyzes the results of the research on the representation of the aesthetic ideal through the image of the ideal hero in two national literatures. For research purposes, attention was paid to highlighting the category of the ideal hero as an expression of the author's aesthetic views. In Sinclair Lewis’s “Arrowsmith” and Pirimkul Kodirov's “The Three Roots”, the protagonists artistically reflect the authors' views on truth, virtue, and beauty. In these novels, professional ethics is described as a high noble value. The scientific novelty of the research work includes the following: in the evolution of western and eastern poetic thought, in the context of the novel genre, the skill, common and distinctive aspects of the creation of an ideal hero were revealed by synthesis of effective methods in world science with literary criteria in the history of eastern and western literary studies, in the example of Sinclair Lewis and Pirimkul Kodirov.

The Role of the Chularajmontri (Shaykh al-IslOEm) in Resolving Ethno-religious Conflict in Southern Thailand

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-53
Author(s):  
Imtiyaz Yusuf
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
National Level ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Southern Thailand ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Set Up

The century-old conflict in southern Thailand, which began with Siam’s annexation of the former Malay sultanate of Negara Patani in 1909, reemerged viciously in 2004 – with no end in sight. The Thai state expected that its official head of the Muslim community at the national level, the chularajmontri (shaykh al-Islam), whose office was set up in 1945 to integrate all Thai Muslims into the new nation-state of Thailand (formerly called Siam), would lay a significant role in resolving the southern conflict. Thus, this office was entrusted with tackling the issue of ethno-religious nationalism among the southern Muslims, an important factor lying at the root of this conflict. The office was expected to address the Thai nation-state’s political and socio-religious needs via promoting a pro-integration religious interpretation of Islam. This paper contends that its failure to contribute toward the conflict’s resolution lies in the differences in the two parties’ historical, ethnic, and religious interpretations of Islam.

scholarly journals Straddling the Border: A Marginal History of Guerrilla Warfare and ‘Counter-Insurgency’ in the Indonesian Borderlands, 1960s–1970s

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1423-1463 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL EILENBERG
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
West Kalimantan ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Nation ◽  
International Border

AbstractPost-independence ethnic minorities inhabiting the Southeast Asian borderlands were willingly or unwillingly pulled into the macro politics of territoriality and state formation. The rugged and hilly borderlands delimiting the new nation-states became battlefronts of state-making and spaces of confrontation between divergent political ideologies. In the majority of the Southeast Asian borderlands, this implied violent disruption in the lives of local borderlanders that came to affect their relationship to their nation-state. A case in point is the ethnic Iban population living along the international border between the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan and the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Based on local narratives, the aim of this paper is to unravel the little known history of how the Iban segment of the border population in West Kalimantan became entangled in the highly militarized international disputes with neighbouring Malaysia in the early 1960s, and in subsequent military co-operative ‘anti-communist’ ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts by the two states in the late 1960–1970s. This paper brings together facets of national belonging and citizenship within a borderland context with the aim of understanding the historical incentives behind the often ambivalent, shifting and unruly relationship between marginal citizens like the Iban borderlanders and their nation-state.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Anne-Marie Curley
Keyword(s):  
Critical Force ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Specialized Training ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Utopian Vision ◽  
Pure Land Buddhism ◽  
Medieval Japan

The utopian vision of the Pure Land that flourished in medieval Japan becomes a problem for some thinkers in the modern Shinshū tradition who, like other religious modernists, find utopianism embarrassing. Theodore Adorno and Edward Said suggest a way of preserving the critical force of utopianism by tying it to exile. Japanese thinkers working during the war years also seize on this possibility, using ideas drawn from Pure Land Buddhism to imagine alternatives to the nation-state. Thinkers without specialized training in ritual or doctrine are able to make use of Buddhism in this way as a result of the same processes of secularization that make the Pure Land a problem for Shin modernizers.

5. The futures of comparative literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-122
Author(s):  
Ben Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Comparative literature is both central and marginal to literary studies: central because it draws on almost every discipline in the Humanities; marginal because it is not tied to any single tradition, risking being ignored by all of them. For all its past struggles and present debates, comparative literature has an increasingly central role to play in the Humanities’ future. ‘The futures of comparative literature’ explains that in this age of specialists, generalists continue to play a vital role in shaping and supporting the life of the mind. International, interdisciplinary forms of knowledge remain the very essence of modernity. Now more than ever, the aesthetic education of comparative literature is indispensable.

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