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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2012
During the last decade, the postcolonial approach has become influential in the humanities and the social sciences. Tracing its own historical origin to interaction with Western European modernity, it focuses on contemporary power inequality, which it intends to eliminate by demonstrating the connection between power and knowledge. Hence, this approach not only puts the present in conversation with the past but also poses power inequality as the analytical lens through which to approach states and societies. In the last decades, a number of scholars working on the Middle East have adopted the postcolonial approach. In this review essay, I initially discuss its application in the study of the region and then contextualize eight recent works within that framework.
1 This Marxian strand originates in Marx to cover subsequent formulations including world systems and dependency theory. See Katz, Stephen, “The Problems of Europecentrism and Evolutionism in Marx's Writings on Colonialism,” Political Studies 38 (1990): 672–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brower, Daniel R. and Lazzerini, Edward J., eds., Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
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8 Connell, Raewyn, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)Google Scholar. On the Global South, see also Levander, Caroline and Mignolo, Walter, “Introduction: The Global South and World Dis/Order,” Global South 5 (2011): 1–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on theorizing from the borders, see Rumford, Chris, “Introduction: Theorizing Borders,” European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2006): 155–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levander and Mignolo, “Introduction”; Alcoff (2007) in critically analyzing Mignolo; Rumford, “Introduction,” on theorizing borders.
9 The term “Southern scholars” refers to all scholars located in the non-Western world and writing from an explicitly non-Western perspective.
10 “Northern scholars” refers to all those located in the rich and powerful north and who advocate a Western approach that privileges the interests of the North at the expense of the poor and dominated South.
11 See Mignolo, Walter, “Cosmopolitanism and the De-Colonial Option,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 29 (2010): 111–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economic Agenda of Modernity,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self Knowledge 7 (2009): 69–88; and “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought, and Decolonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture and Society 26 (2009): 159–81.
12 Göçek, Fatma Müge, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire during the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
13 Göçek, Fatma Müge, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Fatma Müge Göçek, “Deciphering Denial: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and the Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009” (book manuscript, 2012).
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19 See, for example, Salzmann, Ariel, “An Ancien Regime Revisited: ‘Privatization’ and Political Economy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Politics and Society 21 (1993): 393–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Citizens in Search of a State: The Limits of Political Participation in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808–1914,” in Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States, ed. Michael Hanagan and Charles Tilly (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 37–66; Tracy, James D., “Studies in Eighteenth-Century Mughal and Ottoman Trade,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 37 (1994): 197–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aksan, Virginia H., “Ottoman to Turk: Continuity and Change,” International Journal 61 (2005/2006): 19–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Ottoman Military and State Transformation in a Globalizing World,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (2007): 259–72; and idem, “Theoretical Ottomans,” History and Theory 47 (2008): 109–22.
20 Deringil, Selim, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Postcolonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 311–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Ibid., 318.
22 See Makdisi, Ussama, “Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and Evangelical Modernity,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 680–713CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000); “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 768–96; “Rethinking Ottoman Imperialism: Modernity, Violence and the Cultural Logic of Ottoman Reform,” in The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, ed. Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Weber (Beirut: Orient Institute, 2002), 29–48; and “After 1860: Debating Religion, Reform and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002): 601–17.
23 Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 768.
24 Paker, Murat, “Egemen Politik Kültürün Dayanılmaz Ağırlığı” (The Unbearable Weight of the Dominant Political Culture), in Psiko-Politik Yüzleşmeler (Psycho-Political Encounters) (Istanbul: Birikim, 2007), 131–52Google Scholar.
25 Herzog, Christoph and Motika, Raoul, “Orientalism ‘Alla Turca’: Late 19th/Early 20th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback,’” Die Welt des Islams 40 (2000): 139–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shuval, Tal, “The Ottoman Algerian Elite and Its Ideology,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2000): 323–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas Kühn, “Ordering Urban Space in Ottoman Yemen, 1872–1914,” in Hanssen et al., The Empire in the City, 329–47; idem, “Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Ottomanism: Contesting Boundaries of Difference and Integration in Ottoman Yemen, 1872–1919,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (2007): 315–31; Spiridon, Monica, “Identity Discourses on Borders in Eastern Europe,” Comparative Literature 58 (2006): 376–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Provence, Michael, “Ottoman Modernity, Colonialism, and Insurgency in the Interwar Arab East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 205–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Carroll, Lynda, “Building Farmsteads in the Desert: Capitalism, Colonialism and the Transformation of Rural Landscapes in Late Ottoman Period Transjordan,” in Archeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts, ed. Croucher, Sarah K. and Weiss, Lindsay (New York: Springer, 2011): 105–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 See also Blumi, Isa, “The Commodification of Otherness and the Ethnic Unit in the Balkans: How to Think about Albanians,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 12 (1998): 527–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Ottoman Empire and Yemeni Politics in the Sancak of Ta'izz, 1911–18,” in Hanssen et al., The Empire in the City, 349–57; “Contesting the Edges of the Ottoman Empire: Rethinking Ethnic and Sectarian Boundaries in Malesore, 1878–1912,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35 (2003): 237–56; Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania and Yemen, 1878–1918 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2003); and Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800–1912 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
27 Constantinou, Costas M., “Diplomacy, Grotesque Realism, and Ottoman Historiography,” Postcolonial Studies 3 (2000): 213–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gölbaşı, Edip, “‘Heretik’ Aşiretler ve II. Abdülhamid Rejimi: Zorunlu Askerlik Meselesi ve İhtida Siyaseti Odağında Yezidiler ve Osmanlı İdaresi” (Heretical Tribes and the Regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II: Yezidis and Ottoman Administration in Relation to the Issues of Mandatory Military Service and the Politics of Conversion), Tarih ve Toplum 9 (2009): 87–156Google Scholar; idem, “Osmanlı Kolonyalizmi Perspektiflerine dair Eleştirisel bir Değerlendirme” (A Critical Assessment of the Perspectives on Ottoman Colonialism), unpublished paper, 2011; and Riedler, Florian, Opposition and Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire: Conspiracies and Political Cultures (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar.
28 Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar, and “Postcolonial Studies and the Study of History,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzi, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 401–22.
29 Critics of the decline thesis argue that early Ottoman history especially has suffered from a historical analysis that privileges the demise of the empire, thereby working backward from this historical fact to trace the origins and elements of decline over centuries and, in the process, interpreting indigenous processes narrowly as harbingers of a future crisis.
30 Chatty and Finlayson define the region culturally in a broad manner, stretching from Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Western Sahara.
