Research project Contextualizing Fan Noli: Dispersal, Diaspora, Nation and the Historic Roots of Modernity
Contribution to The Many Roads in Modernity: The Transformation of South-East Europe and the Ottoman Heritage from 1870 to the Twenty-first Century (University of Copenhagen, Denmark).
The present contribution, the third in a series of individual works, has arisen out of seminars in the research network “The Many Roads in Modernity” based in the Centre for Modern European Studies (Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen) and funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. The premise of the larger project is that the national narratives of the nineteenth century still dominate the view of the past and the visions of progress in South-East Europe, despite the major changes in the twentieth century. Through numerous commissioned studies and two international conferences, the project seeks to explore regional and transnational perspectives in past and present. This is particularly important because the modernization of South-East Europe took place in interaction between the same factors affecting the rest of Europe (e.g. Enlightenment philosophy, nationalism, mass education and early economic globalization) and tenacious local structures. The guiding hypothesis of the project is that the historical development of modernity need not necessarily follow that of Western Europe; there are many other roads to modernity.
The centre is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and hosted by the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies.
Isa Blumi’s contributions to the project include exploring the lives of the many men and women in the late nineteenth century Ottoman Balkans during political collapse and considering the multi-generational impact these people had throughout the subsequent twentieth century. The multi-case studies conducted in conjunction with the Many Roads in Modernity project goes back several years and illuminate how peoples through migration and temporary settlement transform the Balkan regions, greater Europe (and the Middle East), and the larger world where former Ottoman subjects establish diasporas.
Project description
There is a need to study how many peoples uprooted by the transformation of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th Century began to invest in ways to circumvent the accompanying powers of the modern state. To do this utilizing available sources means exploring how, in attempting to manage these dramatic changes affecting the larger world, peoples of the transitional Balkans began availing themselves to the evolving post-Ottoman nation-states with the hope of fusing efforts of reform with the emerging political-cultural structures of the larger world that was explicitly geared to tear the multi-ethnic Ottoman Balkans apart. By exploring the manner in which some members of the Balkans’ cultural elite, in particular, adapted as their worlds transformed, Professor Blumi’s multi-case studies introduce new methods of interpreting and narrating transitional periods. While providing earlier content for this multi-year project, the most recent explores the utility of the biography to understand processes such as those impacting men like Fan S. Noli, to identify some of the still-uncharted Roads to Modernity. As a publisher, actor and eventually founder of the Albanian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, Fan Noli’s itinerary from the Ottoman Balkans, to Egypt, the United States and then independent Albania itself reveals just how complex life in the Balkans and Black Sea would be during the 1878-1922 period. Mobilizing in critical ways the biography of Fan Noli also suggests, however, that his trajectories are not entirely subordinate to the ethno-nationalist agenda so often associated with men and women like him as they explored a new post-Ottoman life.
Other contributions of Isa Blumi to the larger project include Co-organizing an International Workshop “The Last Ottoman Generation and Interwar Europe,” hosted by CEMES/SAXO, Copenhagen University, December 5 and 6, 2018; Organizing “Movement and Gender in Late Ottoman Contexts,”A Public Panel Debate with guests: Carole Woodall (University of Colorado) and Stacy Fahrenthold (UC Davis), December 9, 2018; Presenting research entitled: “Mobilizing Ottoman Multinationalism: A Global Story about the Modern World,” to the Many Roads in Modernity supported Seminar Viribus Unitis: Myths and Narratives of Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism, 1848-1918, November 3, 2018 (Copenhagen, Denmark); Presenting research entitled “’Don’t We Have Enough Problems?’ When Kosovo Exports its Crisis” for The Many Roads in Modernity Series, Copenhagen University, 25 August 2016 (Copenhagen, Denmark) and contributing chapters to volumes in the Palgrave MacMillan series Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe sponsored by the Many Roads of Modernity Centre: “Ottoman Albanians in an era of Transition: An Engagement with a Fluid Modern World,” in Chovanec, Johanna, Heilo, Olof (Eds.). Narrating Empires: Perceptions of Late Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism (Palgrave, 2021), 191-212. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55199-5. and “Battles of Nostalgic Proportion: The Transformations of Islam-as-Historical-Force in Western Balkan Reconstitutions of the Past,” in Catharina Raudvere (ed.) Nostalgia, Loss & Creativity in South-East Europe: Political and Cultural Representations of the Past (Palgrave, 2018): 37-71. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71252-9_3.
Aim of Project
The recent past of South-East Europe has been dominated by three empires: Russian, Habsburg and especially Ottoman. These have continued to live in the ideas of the significant Other that were developed in the nineteenth century to establish coherent identities in the burgeoning national movements and states. The radical changes in living conditions that characterize modernity (social mobility, urbanization, the liberation of the individual, and increased economic prosperity), were impelled by political ideologies that did not renounce national narratives in which the past was used as a guarantee of cultural authenticity. In contrast to the conventional image of Europe, it is necessary to use an open context for the analysis, to enable a discussion of the significance of the Ottoman experience for an understanding of the political and cultural development of the region. The project is a multi-disciplinary and multi-media collaboration.
The project in which Dr. Blumi is involved aims to study the relationship between the modern history of South-East Europe and the long imperial past of the region, and to use this approach as an alternative to the prevailing models which are based on oppositions: Europe versus the Balkans and the West versus Islam. Through this we expect to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the many roads in modernity in Europe. The focus is on the changes of identity, self-representation and affiliation in the light of the huge systemic pressure triggered by the interaction between external influences and local and regional practice from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the present day. This is studied at different levels from the state to the local community, along with changes in art, literature and religious practice.
The project is divided into the following chronological units:
1. Empire and Nation States in Post-Ottoman Times 1870–1950 focuses on the significance of the Ottoman heritage for attempts by elites and minorities to modernize institutions, social practice and culture in the late Ottoman state and the subsequent nation states until war and occupation in the 1940s radically changed conditions for the development of politics and society.
2. Authoritarian Modernization 1950–1989 focuses on the challenge from “the long Second World War”, that is, the struggle for the state and the memory of the years of war and occupation between, on the one hand, the official modernistic history and, on the other hand, collective and individual memories of an Ottoman past. There is also a focus on authoritarian forms of government and the interplay with external factors, especially the new role of the region as front states in the Cold War and direct Soviet dominance of internal affairs in some of the states.
3. The Return of the Local and Globalization since 1989 focuses on the use of history and idyllic ideas about ethnic and religious particularism in attempts to develop new visions of society. This applies especially to the adaptation of nationalism so that it can contain both the romantic notion of a nexus between people and territory and new global circumstances. It is crucial to analyse how people handle the conflicting ideas about the Ottoman past, which can be linked to the conviction about distinctive local character and to the homage to ideal multicultural empires.
Research Subject:
State Formation, Film, Education, Art History, Journalism/Media Studies, Political Economy, Ethnography, Balkan Studies, Modern European History
Project members
Project managers
Catharina Raudvere
Professor
Members
Mogens Pelt
Associate Professor
Selma Bukovica Gundersen
PhD Fellow
Erik Sjöberg
Marie Curie Fellow
Petek Onur
Marie Curie Fellow
Christoffer Størup
PhD Fellow
Niels Reeh
Associate Professor