Author: William Stroebel
In 1923, the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange uprooted and swapped nearly 2 million Christians and Muslims, “pacifying” the so-called Near East through ethnic partition and refugeehood.
This imposition of borders not only uprooted peoples from their place in the world; it also displaced many of their stories from a place in world literature. In “Literature’s Refuge,” William Stroebel recovers and weaves together work by fugitive writers, oral storytellers, readers, copyists, editors, and translators dispersed by this massive “unmixing” of populations and the broader border logic that it set in motion.
Stroebel argues that two complementary forces emerged as a template for the Eastern Mediterranean’s cultural landscape: the modern border, which reshuffled people through a system of filters and checkpoints; and modern philology, which similarly reshuffled their words and works.
