How should we understand the religious, ethnic and cultural complexity of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey?

This open-access volume addresses this question by mobilizing the concept of ambiguity as a critical lens to examine identities, relations and everyday practices that resist near categorization. It shows how attention to ambiguity opens up new modes of reading and sustains interdisciplinary dialogue. Organized around processes of conversion, Islamization and assimilation, the volume foregrounds social and cultural configurations of individuals and communities, often described as hybrid, liminal, syncretic or heterodox. Through compelling case studies of communities such as the dönme, Kurdo-Armenians, Hemshinlis and Yezidis, as well as individuals with non-Abrahamic and agnostic orientations, the volume demonstrates that ambiguity plays a constitutive role in negotiating identity and belonging in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft, German Research Foundation

Kader Konuk is Professor of German Literature at TU Dortmund University, Germany. Her research focuses on ethnic and religious communities in the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Turkey. Her East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford UP 2010) received the René Wellek Prize of the ACLA and the DAAD award of the GSA.

Gülbin Kiranoglu is a postdoctoral researcher at TU Dortmund University, Germany, investigating how the Hemshinlis articulate their identities through literary and cultural production. Her research focuses on the intersections of cultural memory and minority communities.

Zeynep Tüfekçioglu is a lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen and a postdoctoral researcher at TU Dortmund University, Germany. Her current research focuses on digital literature and its role in the study and teaching of Turkish language and literature in Germany.