“Translation as Modality of Belonging: Cosmopolitan Nativeness in Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson’s Tableau Général de l’Empire Othoman (1788-1794)”
by
Dr. Neveser Köker (Independent Scholar)
[A chapter from book manuscript Traveling Loyalties: Politics of Belonging Beyond Nation and Empire]
Discussant: Dr. Virginia Aksan (McMaster University)
Morrice Hall/Institute of Islamic Studies, Room 328 (Third Floor)
McGill University
Speaker Bio
Neveser Köker is a feminist political theorist currently based in Montréal, QC. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. Prior to moving to Montréal, she worked as a lecturer at Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University. Her current book project, Traveling Loyalties: Politics of Belonging Beyond Nation and Empire, develops belonging as a key concept of modern and contemporary political thought using the rich archives of transnational encounters and exchanges across the Mediterranean. Most recently, her work has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Abstract
This chapter explores translation as a modality of belonging. Focusing on Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson’s Tableau Général de l’Empire Othoman published in 1794, it argues that as a modality of belonging, translation expresses an ambivalent and precarious sociopolitical relation between the individual and the political community. In this sense, translation requires the existence of a multilingual and multicultural subject who is linguistically anchored in at least two communities, a subject who can be called a “cosmopolitan native.” While d’Ohsson was one of the many non-Muslim and non-Turkish Ottoman natives who took on the task of explaining the Ottoman Empire to a European audience, what makes his life and his multi-volume Tableau Général stand out are how they illustrate the opportunities, dangers, and impossibilities of such a task in a time of global socio-political tumult. Having returned to Istanbul from a long sojourn in France almost immediately after the French Revolution, d’Ohsson could convince neither his connections in the capital of the Ottoman Empire nor his patrons in Stockholm of his loyalty to the monarchy. Within the span of two decades, d’Ohsson was transformed from an Ottoman-Armenian-Catholic translator to an exiled (and later mostly forgotten) Swedish historian of the Ottoman Empire residing in Paris. This chapter interweaves d’Ohsson’s biography with close readings of the Tableau Général to show how translation offers a zealous yet pragmatic cosmopolitan modality for belonging. This modality strives for cross-cultural exchange and understanding despite the knowledge that some meanings will be lost, some words will remain untranslatable, and the sense of belonging articulated through one’s native language will be changed forever.
