Post-Ottoman Topologies

How are historians and social scientists to understand the emergence, the multiplicity, and the mutability of collective memories of the Ottoman Empire in the political formations that succeeded it? With contributions focussing on several of the nation-states whose peoples once were united under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty, this volume proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. Developing the concept of topology, contributors explore collective memories of Ottoman identity and post-Ottoman state formation in a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term “late nationalism”.

Nicolas Argenti is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University. He is the author of The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields (2007) and coeditor of several collections, including (with Katharina Schramm) Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission (2010).