Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism and transcultural memories

Research Context
The context of this research is a contemporary climate (in media, culture and much scholarship) that emphasises conflict: Muslims versus Jews; Christians versus Muslims -- above all East versus West. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are shaped by religious, regional and cultural nationalisms, competing claims that hinge on difference. Our network intervenes in contemporary tensions by looking at what the past can teach the present about exchanges and connections between cultural groups. Our subject of the Ottoman Empire, at once one of largest and longest empires and yet still relatively understudied, is rich in such exchanges; its multiethnic cities, including Baghdad, Beirut, Jerusalem, Gaza, Sarajevo and Belgrade, have given way to many recent conflicts . The historical period of the 1780s to the present is especially productive for cultural exchange, as the Ottoman Empire encountered different colonialisms, namely British and French, and then transitioned into postcolonial nationalisms and sectarianisms which are our heritage.

Aims and Objectives
The key aim of the research is to question received ideas about the Ottoman Empire, in particular that it has a single past and that it was an Islamic Empire. Our focus on Ottoman cities discovers the cultural exchanges (which we call 'transcultural') between groups, including non-Muslims and multiple ethnicities. Using a term more intimate than history, our attention to memories traces how experiences, objects, texts, stories, images and practices are passed down. We show the city as not simply an arrangement of buildings but as biographically, poetically, familiarly alive, often bearing the marks of fusion; it is no coincidence that the word 'cosmopolitanism' suggests both urbanity and cultural extroversion. To recover Ottoman transcultural memories, our method juxtaposes different disciplines - history, the literary, the visual. We also foster creative work -- photography, music, performance, life writing, fiction - as forms that do more allusive and imaginative memory work. Photography has a key role to play in restoring an Ottoman city archive because of its associations with what's lost and what's preserved - with nostalgia and memory itself - and with the urban. A photographic exhibition is the main public dissemination and culmination of the research.

Applications and benefits
The key benefit of the research for a general public is educational, social and cultural. Cosmopolitanism teaches us about what is lacking in multiculturalism; examples from the Ottoman past provide a flipside to present divisions, and memories of urban exchanges might go some way towards healing the wounds of identity politics. Our exhibition aimed at the general public uses artwork to show points of conjuncture between East and West. The research benefits to various communities, for example Jewish, Kurdish, Turkish, Armenian, Palestinian, Iraqi, comprise principally promoting awareness of each other's cultural histories and prompting exchange. A participatory element to the exhibition --to be extended via a website -- stimulates the sharing of memories. Organisations specialising in dialoguing between groups will be engaged with a view to the research being applied to underpin their own transcultural work. The network will work with refugee Arts groups and the Arab Image Foundation in order to produce new resources for further study (a photography archive and artwork available via the website). The scholarly outputs (particularly an edition of critical essays) will revitalise the study of the Ottoman Empire by juxtaposing Ottoman cities and showing the vitality of a 'transdiscplinary' approach. In its public forms of dissemination, the research will challenge how Ottoman memories overturn the ideology of a 'clash of civilisations.'

1. The principal impact of the network beyond the academic benefits indicated above will be upon the general public. The advances here will consist of challenging culturally-received notions about conflicts depicted in the media and thus familiar to, and allowing us to draw in, a general public. A supposed clash of civilisations is currently mapped onto oppositions between religions -- Islam versus Christianity, Judaism versus Islam - and 'races' - Arabs versus Jews. Our attention to Ottoman cosmopolitanism will put these constructed antitheses, along with current and recent conflicts in former Ottoman-Empire states (e.g., Iraq, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Israel/Palestine,Cyprus) and set them in a much larger, historical and geographical, and syncretic context. We will show the importance of Ottoman memories for contemporary nationalisms and modernisations, spurred by the fact that Spivak's comments about the importance of Ottoman memories were made in the context of Turkey's still-imminent entry into the European Union.
2. The multicultural communities of London, where our events will take place, will benefit from talks, performances and an exhibition related to the richness of their own, and moreover their cultural neighbours', backgrounds. Our events will bring diverse cultural audiences together and foster social cohesion across contemporary divisions.
3. Other beneficiaries will include specific community groups. We will use the network's focus on a cosmopolitan Ottoman past to enhance the knowledge and research of, and promote debate and participation from, educational and peace-building organisations. We expect to involve groups such as the Coexistence Trust, which builds trust and understanding between Muslim and Jewish students on UK campuses; the UK Kurdish Studies & Student Organisation, a non-political body that strives to promote greater awareness of the Kurds, their political and cultural situation in the Middle East and as a significant minority community in the UK; and Jews for Justice for Palestinians, and Independent Jewish Voices, which both promote dialogic views on peace in Israel/Palestine.
4. We will use the research network to involve and inspire related Arts and refugee groups. Our workshops and outputs will provide creative fora for UK-based arts groups to disseminate and exchange their work under the umbrella of Ottoman cosmopolitanism. We will engage refugee arts groups, such as Renk Art, a group for artists from within the London Turkish and Kurdish Community, and appropriate personnel from the Refugee Arts Project, which promotes among refugees activities and training, using photography, filming, dance and music and community theatre.
5. The exhibition, 'East and West: Visualising the Ottoman City,' will feature the work of four Middle Eastern artists little known in the UK, thereby disseminating their work and promoting their profile here under our research theme. The exhibition's organisational scheme of East and West encounters and conjunctions (rather than oppositions and contrasts) will be presented in a way to show the contemporary relevance of the key ideas of the research to a general interested public.
6. Specific organisations in the Middle East would benefit from our research. We would deposit original artwork and make a contribution to the collection of family photographs at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, a not-for-profit organisation established with the goal of locating, collecting, preserving, interpreting and presenting the photographic heritage of the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora from the mid 19th century to the present. Our images collected under the aegis of Ottoman cosmopolitanism would support and advance the Foundation's stated goal to 'provide an alternative to the Orientalist tendencies of prevailing representations of this region and its people.'