Does an empire ever die? Not if a nation is to emerge out of it, Dimitris Stamatopoulos argues in his Byzantium after the Nation: The Problem of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies. The recent English translation of Stamatopoulos’s influential 2009 study cuts across Greek, Bulgarian, and Albanian national historiographies, and what Stamatopoulos calls “their metatheoretical heritage” (p. 349) in post-Ottoman Turkey and Romania, to examine the variegated historiographical afterlives of the Byzantine Empire in the construction of modern Balkan nations. In each of these historiographical cases, all roads led to Second Rome for the thinkers seeking to craft a modern “nation.” Perhaps paradoxically, as Byzantium’s interconnected case studies reveal, there was no intellectual path to a sustainable Greek or Romanian or Turkish nationhood without first grappling with, say, Iconoclasm or Arianism. Integrating Byzantine history remained essential to the formulation of the intra- and post-imperial communal self, and Constantine’s empire acquired a flurry of new meanings in the 19th-century Balkans precisely as the age of empires was ending.
Two problematics underpin Stamatopoulos’s analysis. The first is the issue of continuity and discontinuity in the creation of national histories. In Stamatopoulos’s approach, his historian-protagonists turn to the Byzantine past because the Romantic notion of nationhood requires them to create a sense of valorous historical continuity. But realistically, the historical narrative of any imagined community is laden with discontinuities—the Byzantine period itself constituted a sizeable disruption in some of the nascent national historiographies Stamatopoulos treats. Byzantium deals with the problem of continuity by focusing on such points of narrative disruption, which often required historiographers of nascent nations to exercise creativity. Such moments of discontinuity are the nodes where divergent historiographical visions, ideological preferences, and political commitments become most transparent. As such, they constitute the most rewarding vantage points for examining any national origin story. Indeed, in each of his discrete but interconnected chapter-length case studies, Stamatopoulos first presents the “canonical” early formulations of a given national history, examining these canons for the tensions they contained. He then turns to those historiographical visions (often by hitherto-neglected late and post-Ottoman historians) that challenged the canon by offering new interventions at—and oftentimes altogether new ways to bridge—these points of discontinuity. As a result of such historiographical interventions, new and sometimes shaky historical continuities were formed, representing new conceptualizations of Greekness or Albanianness or Turkishness, formulated against the canonical grain.
Stamatopoulos’s second central problematic is that his Balkan intellectuals were operating in a world of hegemonic Orientalist discourse, which had the discipline of history as one of its foci of discursive domination. The existence of a canonical “body of institutionalized Western knowledge of Byzantium that sought new ways to subordinate the East culturally” (p. 354) meant that virtually all of Stamatopoulos’s protagonists inhabited the ever-uncertain positionality of the learned “native” in attempting to formulate usable histories of nation and empire. Even as they perpetrated differing aspects of such Orientalist thinking, these “native” thinkers were rarely at ease with the full historical and civilizational vision of any Western scholar. Byzantium brilliantly portrays intellectuals of Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans not as mere translators or “receivers” who parroted hallowed European historiographical orthodoxies (or, for that matter, as mere reactionaries). Instead, these figures emerge as original intellectuals in their own right. As Byzantium carefully contextualizes their polemics and traces their intellectual positions, the reader realizes that Namık Kemal holds his own against Ernest Renan, and that Manuel Gedeon boldly counteracts Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (and, by extension, Joseph von Hammer). To be a “native” intellectual engaging with Western knowledge meant to be an expert but also sometimes a wily negotiator—deconstructing one pillar of Orientalist thinking from the shade of another. Byzantium is a remarkable account of the surprising turns such complex, uneasy intellectual negotiations could take, and should therefore interest not only intellectual historians but also scholars of reception studies: the book reveals conceptualizations of Ancient Greece beyond the hallowed halls of European academies, and delineates the links between the reception of Ancient Greek “classical” legacy and the construction of other “classical” legacies from the Illyrian to the Abbasid.
Luckily for the reviewer, it is possible to summarize the spirit of Stamatopoulos’s Byzantium in a single sentence from the work itself: “One could claim that [Şemseddin] Sami’s stance could be linked to the corresponding ideological and political positions of [Manuel] Gedeon and [Gavril] Krâstevich” (p. 283). This is not the sort of statement one reads often, even if one is intimately interested in the intellectual history of the late Ottoman Empire or the Balkans. Stamatopoulos’s treatment of Ottoman thinkers as (seemingly) divergent as Sami Frasheri, Manuel Gedeon, Namık Kemal, and Gavril Krâstevich as figures that demand—and reward—comparison not only with the European thinkers they drew from but also with one another makes the case for a truly imperial conception of the late Ottoman intellectual world. Indeed, as Stamatopoulos moves from the Greek to Albanian to Bulgarian to Turkish cases, he always treats new historiographers with a comparative eye toward those already discussed. The result is that Byzantium emerges as a trans-communal study of late and post-Ottoman intellectualism and historiography—a truly rare unhyphenated Ottoman history. After all, even when their political commitments were at odds, the thinkers of Byzantium wrestled with similar questions and undertook often-convergent methodologies in producing their differing visions of empire, nation, history, self, and other. Of note, Byzantium also constitutes a rare study of “minor” literatures in the Deleuzian sense. Most of Stamatopoulos’s historians belong to various Ottoman minorities, and many write in “minor” languages; the self-reflexive anxiety of belonging to a cultural and political minority, and the very awareness that any nascent post-Ottoman “nation” begins as an imperial minority, is crucial to their historiographical agenda. Unsurprisingly, Byzantium locates a vein of “religious ecumenism that corresponds to the sanctity of a language” (p. 274) in how minority intellectuals from Gedeon to Krâstevich to Frasheri conceptualize “the nation” from within the Ottoman Empire.
Diane Shugart’s astute translation rarely falters in the difficult task of rendering Stamatopoulos’s dense volume—and the more unforgiving elements of academic Greek—into lucid English prose. There is one translation-related point on which Stamatopoulos and his editors seem too zealous: all quotations from primary sources are given only in English translation, and with such a minute intellectual history, the lack of original text can be frustrating. Occasionally, original terms are given, but the (often tricky and sometimes uncomfortable) Greek term genos is variously translated as millet, nation, and race, often without clear context as to why a given choice is made. As Stamatopoulos himself argues, his protagonists themselves often did not quite agree on the meaning of the word. A problematization of the word genos—and its often arguably racial connotations–—as a fundamental building block of Ottoman and post-Ottoman Greek thought, and of Greek communal/national identity, is overdue. Such a confrontation would have deepened Byzantium’s remarkable insights on the elaboration of Greek selfhood and communality.
Byzantium after the Nation is perhaps best described as an intellectual kintsugi of late and post-Ottoman thought—it is the rifts, connections, and intellectual in-betweens it delineates that glimmer the brightest. Indeed, Byzantium is almost feverish in its eye toward continuity and rupture, and in its drawing of connections and comparisons: between the “Western” and the “Oriental,” between Turk and Albanian and Greek, and between (imperial) memory and (national) desire. It is a dense and voluminous work, no light reading even by the standards of intellectual history, but it carries the beauty of any serious attempt at a scholarly Gesamgtkunstwerk. Some of Stamatopoulos’s more polemical positions will find their opponents, but no scholar of Greek, Balkan, or late Ottoman thought can afford to ignore Byzantium’s propositions about how empires survive and accumulate into nations.
