Comparative Orientalisms in Mexican/Bengali/Turkish Literature – Comparatistas

Date: 7th March 2019
Time: 15 – 16:30 pm
Venue: Room B.2

The talk will attempt to answer a number of questions concerning the place of Islam in World Literature, drawing on Mexican, Bengali and Turkish non-Muslim/non-believing responses to Islam and the Islamic Orient (amongst them Octavio Paz and Fernando del Paso, Oguz Atay and Orhan Pamuk, Rabindranath Tagore and Amitav Ghosh).

Not simply the most obvious question – to what extent is a Western/Orientalist set of lexicons invoked by these non-Western writers in describing Islam? – but also a range of subtler concerns:

Exactly how are Islamic landscapes and vocabularies used as foils for the writers’ own secular agendas?
If an Islamic Middle East is seen as having played some role in the formation of the author’s current (national?) identity, what kind of status does it have?
When Octavio Paz mentions the Arabs who influenced Spanish culture, or when Tagore laments the Moghul past which has reconfigured Bengali identity in an “Arabian Nights” fashion, or when Pamuk wonders to what extent Islam is ontologically central to the status of his own Turkish identity…what does this say about the place of Islam as a central font of diverse identities across the planet?

The essay will, finally, also try to connect these questions to wider, more recent debates in World Literature (Apter, Mufti, the Warwick Research Collective) concerning the extent to which this secular use of an Orient as a means of collective self-inquiry is the symptom of a wider set of analogous, trans-cultural mechanisms within capitalist modernity.

This activity takes place through the FCT-funded TECOP research project (PTDC/CPC-CMP/0398/2014) and the Portuguese Orientalism research cluster Portuguese Orientalism (LOCUS group) of the Centre for Comparative Studies (UID/ELT/0509/2019).