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Today, imperial knowledge produced on Asia in the 19th century tends to be discussed in terms of colonial power relations, asymmetrical epistemic hierarchies, and an often-assumed clear-cut binary between the West and the Other. The case of late Ottoman travel literature on Central Asia and the Caucasus appears to complicate this dichotomy.In his presentation David Leupold seeks to decode from the historical texts key discursive prisms that had informed Ottoman travelers’ gaze upon the “Empire’s East”: the imperial-religious prism, which sees the region as an imperial hinterland of widespread religious ignorance (cahilik) and inter-ethnic fragmentation in need of pan-Islamic unity (ittihad-i islam); the colonial-modernizing prism, which perceives it as a geography of backwardness (gerikalmışlık) in need of Ottoman “civilizational progress”; and the proto-national prism, which envisages it as nothing less than the “primordial homeland” of a Turkish nation-in-the-making. All three prism tap in with wider discourses of the period essential for the understanding of the “Ottoman gaze” as expression of a “nationalizing empire”.
The talk will conclude with discussing the usefulness of comparing them with Russian travelogues, given the similar positioning of the Romanov Empire as a “janus-faced empire” (Tlostanova 2003) or “subaltern empire” (Morozov 2015) that lies both within and without Europe.
Discussant: Lilit Dabagian is an independent researcher in the field of historical anthropology and intergenerational memory as well as designer of multimedia educational projects.
📅 May 15, 2026
⏰ 6:00 PM
📍 3 Aram Khachatryan St., Yerevan + Online
Register in advance: https://ycie.forms.app/possessions-and-colonies-of-the-mind
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Event Venue
3 Aram Khachatryan, 0033 Yerevan, Armenia, Արամ Խաչատրյան փողոց 33, Երեւան, Հայաստան, Yerevan, Armenia
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