Stroebel, William. Literature's Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2025.

 

Let’s start with the title: Literature’s Refuge. It seems to hold a promise out to its readers. In a world beset by war and mass displacement, literature stands ready to offer us a refuge, a safe space to recover our shared humanity. Literature, in other words, is a feel-good vehicle for celebrating our common humanist values. Right? 

Maybe so, but read the title again from a different angle and you’ll see another meaning hiding in plain sight. Maybe, in fact, it’s suggesting the exact opposite, that the refuge is not being offered by literature to us, but that literature itself stands in dire need of a refuge. Maybe literature, no less than the human hands who have made it, has been beset by war, partition, and displacement; maybe large chunks of literature have been torn apart and cast to the winds, while other pieces of it have been captured, annexed, and assimilated by the very forces, such as nationalism, that displaced it in the first place; maybe literature needs a refuge of its own — to gather up its survivors, to lick its wounds — before it can offer any kind of asylum to others.

This was my thought in making Literature’s Refuge. I had spent years reading through the Greek and Turkish literary canons, digging through their pages for contact points, dialogue, kinship, and solidarity. These were two languages and textual traditions with so much in common, such a deep and rich history in a shared geography that was both cultural and physical, and yet the Greek and Turkish literary canons (as they had been presented to me in course syllabi, reading lists, and library shelves) spent so little time speaking to each other. The more I read, the more I realized: they were both the product of a century or more of mass violence and displacement. 

Greek and Turkish literature as we know them today emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, which died a slow death over the first quarter of the twentieth century. From 1912 to 1925—just a dozen or so years—the region’s complex human geography was carved up through genocide, mass deracination, and border-making. It was like a cancer: modern borders metastasized down through the Balkan peninsula, across Anatolia, and into the Levant; geopolitical borders, linguistic borders, racial borders, and internal borders mushroomed up across the Eastern Mediterranean, grabbing hold of minoritized peoples and dragging them kicking and screaming from their homes and homelands. And the thing about the modern border is, it never lets you go. You carry it inside you for the rest of your life. From the Armenian Genocide to the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange to Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, the region served as ground zero for modern border-making, and many of those wounds are still raw today.

Modern philology — the founding discipline of literary studies — was complicit in these processes of modern border-making. The philological institutions of the Greek and Turkish states, such as endowed university chairs, research agendas, printed editions, and literary canons, were all built atop ethno-religious partition and cultural genocide. Think, for example, of the corpus of Arabic-script Greek-language Islamic poetry, written by Greek-speaking Muslims; or Greek-script Turkish-language literature, written by Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians. These literatures were misfits; they failed to align with the language, alphabet, or religion of either national canon and so national philology on both sides of the sea either ignored them or dismantled them for parts and shunted bits and pieces of them into footnotes or appendices, actively excluding them from mainstream publishing and, of course, from classrooms. This kind of “refugee literature” was not simply a literature of refugees; it was an entire literary corpus made into a refugee by philological partition, uprooted from institutional memory. 

 

^{League of Nations, File R1761/48/25256/24318.}

^{Courtesy of the United Nations Archives at Geneva.}

 

But in the great shake-up of modern borders, there were of course other bits and pieces of refugee, diaspora, and emigre literature that did make it into the canon, and you can find some of these in my book as well: think of Constantine Cavafy, for example, now taught in secondary schools in Greece and universities across the globe. Cavafy’s poetry was once anathema in the leading intellectual circles of Athens, derided in coded racial language that marked it as “African” or “Islamic,” and it was only over several decades after his death and through explicit editorial reformatting that Cavafy’s poetry at last passed through the checkpoints of the Greek canon. The philological border regime that I trace out, in other words, was not a simple wall that stopped stories from circulating; it picked them apart, extracting value, assimilating what it could and displacing what it could not into footnotes, special collections, or oblivion.

Part of the gambit of my book, then, is to place known and unknown works of refugee, diasporic, and emigre literature side by side in a shared space of refuge — a space of horizontal solidarity, where an unpublished and forgotten poet like Şani, a Greek-speaking Muslim of Greece, can stand side by side with Cavafy, a well-known Greek-speaking poet of Egypt, a space where the institutional logic of canon formation no longer funnels and filters texts and stories into hierarchies of value, assimilation, and displacement, but where texts and the human hands that made them, read them, and remade them can speak for themselves on their own terms, across the divides of religion, race, language, or alphabet.

 

^{Tuhfe-i Şani be Zeban-ı Yunani [Şani’s Gift in the Greek Tongue], f. 52a.}

^{Courtesy of Bavarian State Library.}

 

Literature’s Refuge spans a wide ambit of texts and media formats, from unpublished Islamic manuscripts to Greek-language ephemeral print to refugee commonplace books to published novels. It ranges from Ioannina to Anatolia to Egypt. It works through the philological aftermath of the Population Exchange, the decimation of the Greek diaspora of Egypt, and the de facto partition of Cyprus. It tries in its own humble way to weave together a motley cast of voices, not just the authors themselves but the whole breadth of human hands bound up in the production, circulation, and reproduction of these stories: writers, oral storytellers, readers, copyists, translators, reviewers, publishers, editors, book binders, and curators — many of them refugees themselves. And while I certainly hold no punches in my assessment of institutional philology, Literature’s Refuge does not abandon the tools of philology per se but uses them to reverse engineer the literary canon, dismantling it piece by piece and reassembling it into a new map of the Eastern Mediterranean, along the borderscape of Greek, Turkish, Christian, and Islamic fault lines, reaching into the cracks of those fault lines and pulling up whatever survivors it can find.

No book is perfect, and I will be the first to admit my limitations. Several of the languages that I would have liked to see woven into this tapestry are missing, for the simple reason that I don’t speak them: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, or Slavo-Macedonian, for example. And it’s not unlikely that the book has other blind spots or outright errors in its application or analysis. Don’t get me wrong, it was often a real joy to research and to write Literature’s Refuge, shot through with moments of discovery and serendipity, but it was also at times a real pain in the ass — fifteen years of trial and error, unexpected dead ends, and finding my way in the uncharted wilderness. But wherever and however it fails, my hope is that at least its curiosity and generosity of spirit, its model of thinking, and its methodological blueprint (which I truly believe will open new pathways across world literature) might be taken up and expanded by more capable hands than mine in the years to come.