A Literary History of the Mediterranean from its East and South
During his research stay in Berlin and Saarbrücken, Ceyhun will work on his second book project, tentatively entitled A Literary History of the Mediterranean from its East and South, which examines literary works from/on various vantage points of the Mediterranean, such as Istanbul and Marseilles, to reassess the Mediterranean’s history. Ceyhun’s s book argues that authors such as ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī and Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan appropriated modern understandings of the Mediterranean in order to generate their cultural and political vision. He uses the methodology of philology and of close reading to examine Mediterranean legacies described in writings on islands, regions, and port cities of the Mediterranean. His project studies literary texts for complementing and disrupting the current historiography on the Mediterranean. It undermines the tendency to examine a few events, such as the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople/Istanbul, as sole turning points in the region’s history. His book also moves beyond earlier attempts to study the Mediterranean through the prism of a single theme, such as colonialism, or object of analysis, such as port cities or islands. It studies places that were examined separately in different fields such as Maghreb studies and Ottoman studies in conjunction with each other for generating a more multilayered understanding of the Mediterranean.