2025 Theses Doctoral

Persian Letters: Language, Politics and Desire in the Late Ottoman Empire

Blackthorne-O'Barr, Erik Aldritch Charlemagne

This dissertation is an intellectual and cultural history which examines how the Persian language, and the notion of Persianate cultural influence upon Ottoman Turkish language and literature, was conceptualized by Ottoman intellectuals, authors, and artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces the development of several terms of Ottoman Turkish discourse — among them, “Persianate exaggeration” [mübalağa-ı Acemâne], “Persianate fantasy” [hayâlât-ı Acemâne], and “Persophilia” [Acemperestlik] — and examines the radical experiments in linguistics, literary aesthetics, and the imagination of the desiring subject that these terms engendered. Through a close study of three key figures of the late Ottoman period — the revolutionary poet, journalist and statesman Namık Kemal (1840–1888), the author and soldier Ömer Seyfettin (1884–1920), and the cabaret performer Peruz Terzakyan (c. 1866–1919) — it argues that the conflation of the Persianate with nonsense, fantasy, and fatalistic enjoyment was foundational to the articulation of a Turkish literary and linguistic modernity autonomous from the deprecated “Persianized” [Acemleşmiş] Ottoman past, with legacies that have persisted through the comprehensive sociolinguistic reforms of the subsequent Turkish Republic.

This dissertation is divided into three sections. The first examines the writings of expatriateor exilic Iranian intellectuals in nineteenth-century Istanbul in connection with Ottoman and Turkish writers and artists of the same period, and follows their debates on script, language, and literary style in the context of comparative linguistics and the racialization of language. It focuses in particular on the epistolary encounter of the Iranian reformist intellectual Mirza Malkum Khān (1834–1908) and Namık Kemal, and argues that through these engagements the Ottoman Persianate increasingly was defined by the elevation of fantasy over reality, wordplay over meaning, and gendered tyranny over freedom.

Sections two and three examine how this notion of the Persianate structured the later linguistic projects of Ömer Seyfettin and Peruz Terzakyan, as case studies of this discourse in its most extreme forms: the first, a proposal for a definitive break in both language, literature, and modes of desire, and the second an experiment in radical estrangement, exploding language beyond the limits of sense. It concludes by exploring the movement of the Persianate from high literary culture during the Ottoman era into a marker of marginalized subjectivity and queered nonsense in the contemporary Turkish Republic.