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Longhand Lines of Flight: Cataloging Displacement in a Karamanli Refugee's Commonplace Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2021

William Stroebel
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Abstract

This essay examines a handwritten refugee ballad in a handmade codex, using both to illuminate some of the lingering blind spots in national philology and world literature. The ballad, printed in full after the essay, belongs to the Karamanli Christians of Anatolia, who spoke Turkish but wrote it in the Greek alphabet. Uprooted from Turkey by the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923, Karamanli refugees were scattered across Greece and North America, where they were often excluded from publishing. Poets like the author of the present ballad, Agathangelos, turned instead to more accessible manuscript formats. I interpret Agathangelos's ballad and codex as a catalog, documenting and preserving his lost homeland, where multiple scriptworlds, languages, and confessions coexisted. I conclude by calling for a people’s history of the book to decentralize and democratize world literature’s political economy (tacitly accepted as print capitalism), foregrounding textual networks that have remained illegible to our discipline.

Type
Essays
Information
PMLA , Volume 136 , Issue 2 , March 2021 , pp. 190 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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References

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