This digital book is a companion to Of Sunken Islands and Pestilence: Restoring the Voice of Edward Taylor Fletcher to Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature. It is intended as an aid to readers, in particular students and scholars, who wish to know more about Fletcher’s works. The ideas that drove Fletcher’s creative works are on display here,…[Read more]

This working paper presents in full translation four texts of the Uzbek early 20th-century jadid reformist Abdurrauf Fitrat. Identifying educational reform as the main key to progress, he advocated for the emancipation and nationalisation of the Chaghatay/Uzbek language as a tool to educate the masses rather than to serve the interests of a…[Read more]

The Mandaean proselyte Meryay, best known from her representations in the Canonical Prayerbook, the Great Treasure (Genzā Rabbā), and the Book of John (Drāši d-Yaḥyā), serves as an illuminating example of the sort of figure who partially and ambiguously bridges the interests and concerns of differently constituted religious communities, allowi…[Read more]

This working paper presents a 16th- or 17th-century Ottoman translation-cum-commentary of the preface and introduction of one of the classics of Islamicate rhetoric, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (The Key’s Digest), a 14th-century work on rhetoric based on al-Sakkākī’s 13th-century seminal Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Sciences). This part…[Read more]

La tecnología con la que contamos en nuestros tiempos nos ha dado la capacidad de satisfacer nuestros anhelos de admiración y reconocimiento. Es cierto, quizá no todos seamos Napoleón con un mausoleo que señala nuestra grandeza, pero todos podemos tener un muro de Facebook, un perfil de Twitter o una cuenta de Instragram… lo más importa…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cam…[Read more]

Women’s literary expression in Latin America started as a crossroads of rhetorical practices and textual devices that included the knowledge and transmission of oral traditions, visual iconic narratives, tangible systems of record keeping, and the incorporation of the alphabetic script. I propose to look at the written production of Indigenous w…[Read more]

Num dos envelopes do espólio pessoano, encontram-se 56 folhas dactilografadas, quase sem emendas, com o que aparenta ser boa parte de uma peça teatral em inglês. O problema: não há indicação de título, nem de autor. Será um inédito de Fernando Pessoa? Uma tradução inglesa de uma peça olvidada de outro dramaturgo português? Num momento em qu…[Read more]

The translation of a short treatise on paranomasia, simile, and metonymy, by the foremost Persian-Turkish lexicographer of the 15th century, Lütfu’llāh el–Ḥalīmī. The text combines a rather dense and elliptic prose style with a remarkably lucid and clear-cut typology of seven types of tajnīs, seven types of tashbīh, and nine types of majāz, ofte…[Read more]

In early seventeenth century, Francisco de Avila, Huarochiri’s extirpator of idolatries, and Guaman Poma de Ayala rejected the mestizo either for personal convenience or as a matter of concern for the fate of the Andean race. This article examines the places of enunciation from which these and other authors categorized some individuals as u…[Read more]

This essay studies the textual and visual representation of “the Indians of Peru” and their place in the illustrated edition of the Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) by José de Acosta, prepared by the sons of publisher Theodore De Bry. Such edition was published in 1601-1602 as the ninth volume of The Great Voyages. This essay disc…[Read more]

Based on a critical and reflective reading of Guaman Poma’s “New Chronicle and Good Government” (1615) [Nueva corónica y buen gobierno], this essay departs from the understanding of Waman Poma’s work as an “Opera Aperta” (Quispe-Agnoli 2020). Visual and written texts are understood initially as written-visual semantic fields that stimulat…[Read more]

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the second centennial of Ākhūndzade’s birth, three Azerbaijani texts in translation by the Molière of Azerbaijan. The texts—one poem, one letter, and one prose text—reflect Ākhūndzāde’s sharp, sometimes vitriolic, take on Rūmī ’s teaching (a dangerous, incomprehensible word jumble), most poetry and po…[Read more]

In the first few centuries of Islam, Middle Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike all faced the challenges of preserving their holy texts in the midst of a changing religious landscape. This situation led Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew scholars to develop new fields of linguistic science in order to better analyse the languages of the Bible and…[Read more]

Are you tripping over your own feet, incapable of advancing even a single metre, when it comes to understanding the technicalities of the feet and metres of pre-modern Islamicate poetry? Then you should probably not consult Nevāʾī’s Meter of Meters, since you are better off with the works of a Wheeler Thackston or a Finn Thiesen… If, howe…[Read more]

Considerando o catálogo Lumière como experiência inaugural do cinema mundial, este artigo propõe uma leitura anarquívica de algumas de suas imagens. Diferenciando a operação do cinematógrafo como dispositivo cosmotécnico de arquivamento do mundo e aparelho cosmopoético de invenção de mundos, exploro as formas de inscrição da diferença no…[Read more]

Reflections on Trevor Paglen’s (ab)use of the JAFFE dataset

The essay explores the use of digital history for the systematic study of the periodical press in the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean (1906 –1918) as a discursive field. It evaluates the methodological and practical challenges of digital history as rooted in the socio-technical infrastructures of the Global North when applied to the Global S…[Read more]

Purportedly in response to a request by his unnamed beloved one, the late 18th-century Ottoman poet Ḥasan-i Yāver wrote Poetry’s Artistry, a 441-verse mathnawī that offers some hands-on advice for trying one’s hand at poetry. As tashbīh, jinās, kināya, taḍādd, taḍmīn, ilmām, iltifāt, tardīd, ishtibāh, tawriya, īhām, takhmīs, tarkīb-band,…[Read more]