Lines of Flight: Karamanli Refugee Literature after 1923

Event time: 
Thursday, March 28, 2019 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE ), 202 See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

What happens when a refugee community is denied access to mainstream media? How do they tell their stories? This talk will explore this question through the case of the Karamanli Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire who spoke Turkish but wrote it in the Greek alphabet. In 1924, they were uprooted from their homelands as part of the massive Greco-Turkish Population Exchange and deported to Greece, where they faced systemic discrimination and exclusion due to their language. Mainstream Greek print either ignored the Karamanlis or, when it deigned to discuss them, objected shrilly to their Turkish and threatened them with censorship. During the previous century in Asia Minor they had developed a thriving print network, yet after their deportation to Greece their print died almost overnight. Be that as it may, Karamanli book production did not end in the 1920s. This talk will guide the audience through one case study, focusing on a series of manuscript poems and novels that were bound together, disassembled, and re-bound in hand-made, composite codices up to the 1940s, which in turn continued to be used and circulated by readers for decades thereafter. These works speak to a dedicated if fragile refugee literary network that survived well after the Population Exchange—and well beyond the outermost margins of commercial publishing.

Will Stroebel is a Hannah Seeger Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. Stroebel is a comparatist specializing in Modern Greek and Turkish Literature, Book History and Mediterranean Studies. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in December 2017. His dissertation, “Fluid Books, Fluid Borders: Greek and Turkish Book Networks in a Shifting Sea” is the winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s prestigious Bernheimer Award for Best Dissertation in the Field of Comparative Literature, as well as the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. His work has appeared in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Ergon, and Book History.

203-432-0061