Will Stroebel

Literature’s Refuge does what its title promises. Zooming in on the civilizational fault lines that have carved up the Mediterranean between Europe and the Middle East, it breaks the silence of a century of forced displacement and provides a refuge to the fugitive voices of Greece, Turkey, and beyond.

At the close of the First World War, two complementary forces were building a template for the broader region’s cultural landscape: on the one hand, the modern border regime, which displaced, replaced, and reformatted millions of people, funneling them through a system of filters and checkpoints; on the other hand, modern philology and mainstream media, which funneled and filtered their voices and stories from within and across that border regime. Amidst the experience of mass ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, whose stories were cited and whose were slighted?  Philologists, publishers, and tastemakers defined modern literature by picking apart, extracting, reformatting or dispossessing refugee and diasporic texts and textual handlers across a racialized borderscape.

Literature’s Refuge steps into the chinks and crannies of this geography to recover and weave together its fugitive writers, oral storytellers, readers, copyists, editors, and translators, charting out the rich and complex textual geography between Greek Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam, between Greek-script, Arabic-script, and Latin-script literature across Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and Egypt. More broadly, Literature’s Refuge offers a new methodological toolkit for rewriting the modern civilizational borderscapes of our world, one page at a time.