Literature's Refuge

Stories silenced or sequestered by a century of mass displacement between Europe and the Middle East-recovered and retold at last.

In 1923, the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange uprooted and swapped nearly two 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. Philologists and publishers defined modern literature by picking apart, extracting, reformatting, or dispossessing refugee and diasporic texts across a racialized borderscape-a gray zone of semi-inclusion and semi-exclusion, semimobility and immobility.