Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries

Paul Manning

Open Access Published by Academic Studies Press 2012

Strangers in a Strange Land

Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries

Paul Manning
Funded by: National Endowment for the Humanities and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program

In the series Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781618117076

Overview
Contents

About this book

Manning examines the formation of nineteenth-century intelligentsia print publics in the former Soviet republic of Georgia both anthropologically and historically. At once somehow part of “Europe,” at least aspirationally, and yet rarely recognized by others as such, Georgia attempted to forge European style publics as a strong claim to European identity. These attempts also produced a crisis of self-defi nition, as European Georgia sent newspaper correspondents into newly reconquered Oriental Georgia, only to discover that the people of these lands were strangers. In this encounter, the community of “strangers” of European Georgian publics proved unable to assimilate the people of the “strange land” of Oriental Georgia. This crisis produced both notions of Georgian public life and European identity which this book explores.

Author / Editor information

Paul Manning (PhD University of Chicago) is an associate professor of Anthropology at Trent University. His recent publications include “The Epoch of Magna: Capitalist Brands and Postsocialist Revolutions in Georgia” (Slavic Review), “Rose-Colored Glasses? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia” (Cultural Anthropology), “Materiality and Cosmology: Old Georgian Churches as Sacred, Sublime, and Secular Objects” (Ethnos).

Reviews

Julie A. Christensen:
". . . The book promises to play a key role in the further development of Caucasian and Georgian studies, and it opens new territories for exploration and investigation by a hopefully expanded reading public or 'imagined community of scholars.' Particularly relevant here, Manning makes a major contribution by demonstrating how Georgians themselves put together many familiar tropes about the Caucasus stemming from the Russian ‘geopoetic and geopolitics’ of Romantic poetry and literature, including the ‘imperial sublime’ and the feminization of Orthodox Georgia as the ‘oriental beauty’"

Stephen F. Jones:
“This is a sophisticated exploration of the complex and often contradictory elements of nation-building and identity-formation in Georgia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Manning, has an extraordinary understanding of the subtleties of Georgian writing. Drawing on Gerogian newspapers, poetry, and short stories, and focusing on Georgia’s encounters with Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, he weaves together a complex challenge to the familiar Western tropes of the imagined community. Manning has produced a novel theoretical contribution to our ideas about the role of intellectuals in national identity formation.”

Topics

Frontmatter Open Access Download PDF	1
Contents Open Access Download PDF	6
List of Illustrations Open Access Download PDF	7
Maps Open Access Download PDF	7
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	8
Introduction: Europe Started Here Open Access Download PDF	10
I: Languages of Nature, Culture, and Civilization: Letters of a Traveler Open Access Download PDF	28
II: Imperial and Colonial Sublime: The Aesthetics of Infrastructures Open Access Download PDF	59
III: Correspondence: “Georgians, that is, readers of Droeba” Open Access Download PDF	81
IV: Spies and Journalists: Aristocratic and Intelligentsia Publics Open Access Download PDF	111
V: Writers and Speakers: Pseudonymous Intelligentsia and Anonymous People Open Access Download PDF	155
VI: Dialogic Genres: Conversations and Feuilletons Open Access Download PDF	183
VII: Writing and Life: Fact and Fairy Tale Open Access Download PDF	219
VIII: Fellow Travelers: Localism, Occidentalism, and Orientalism Open Access Download PDF	251
Conclusion: A Stranger from a Strange Land Open Access Download PDF	286
Endnotes Open Access Download PDF	299
References Open Access Download PDF	319
Index Open Access Download PDF	334

Language: English
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 345

eBook

Published: December 17, 2017
ISBN: 9781618117076