Author: Michael James Erdman
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Not Your Stereotype: Laz Written Expression in Turkey
A few months ago, I wrote about a small-run personal history of the town of Azakh written in the Azakheni dialect of Arabic. In the preamble, I mentioned that there are a whole host of ethnicities resident in Turkey lacking official recognition or support for cultural autonomy. Despite such administrative inertia, the names and customs…
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The Historicity of the Mundane: Turkish Periodicals from the 1930s
What the ephemera of the everyday gives us is how ordinary people lived through such changes; how they saw them reflected in themselves, and how they, in turn, saw themselves reflected or erased in new ideals.
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Lives Seen: Anatolian Arabic, Azakh and Authorial Authority
In a previous blog post, I noted how the Treaty of Lausanne established, among other things, official recognition of the communal rights of the Greeks of Istanbul, Armenians and Jews by the Ottoman Empire. These rights included mother-tongue education, religious instruction, and publishing activities. To assume that these three were the only minorities to benefit…
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Kushta/Istanbul
As Jews, we often operate in two overlapping, but distinct cultural realms. Growing up in Canada, my sisters and many of my friends had two names: an English one and a Hebrew one. I was lucky to have a name that worked in both languages, but those who did have two monikers were none…
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Balo Bilatti and the Trials of Exile
At the start of May, a row erupted between the political classes of Armenia and Azerbaijan regarding each titular nation’s alleged collaboration with Nazi forces during the Second World War. The Great Patriotic War, as it is often known in the former Soviet states, is still a major event in many nations’ historical narratives. The…
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An Island of Literary Freedom: Kurdish Writers in Soviet Armenia
In 2017, I wrote about the Kurdish-language children’s books published in Armenia during the Soviet period. While these publications are certainly noteworthy, they really only tell a part of the story of Kurdish book culture in Armenia. Within its context, the production of Kurdish-language printed materials in the Soviet Caucasus is a parable for…
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日本のチュルク人 : A Look at Soviet Turkic Exile Politics in Japan
A look at 1930s Turkic exile politics in Japan through the history of a Yangi Yapon Mokhbire magazine.
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Assyrian Cultural Production in Baathist Iraq
In 2014, I enrolled in a beginners’ Syriac course at SOAS, motivated largely by curiosity. The lectures concentrated on the Peshitta and Classical Syriac, which is the usual focus for learners in Anglo-American academic institutions. Nevertheless, it soon became apparent that Syriac, far from being the preserve of a priestly-academic class, was part of a…
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The Sanzhyra: An Unabashedly Personal History
History is a funny thing. For starters, the word has many different connotations in English. It might be events and situations in the past. Or it could be the study of those happenings (but not the study of the study, that’s historiography). And, of course, it has colloquial uses too: “We’ve got history” speaks to…
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Orientalisme à la ougrienne: Károly Jenő Ujfalvy de Mezőkövesd
In the third chapter of his work Orientalism, Edward Said explores the impact that the 19th century craze for geography had on the development of a European ideology of the East. Said’s particular focus is on the Arab regions of Western Asia. As such, his primary talking points are those British and French scholars…
From Altay to Yughur 