Abstract

This project is concerned with the processual and contingent character of Anglo-Ottoman encounters in the era between 1570 and 1660, a time of fundamental cultural changes, as well as of changes in an English foreign policy that seeks to situate the country in a globalising world. Analysing Turk plays, travelogues, and other forms of prose texts such as conduct books for diplomats, the project probes into the strategies of evoking, negotiating, and staging cultural encounters through textual means. Combining the study of performativity with postcolonial approaches, it posits that these texts open up spaces both for testing strategies of coming to terms with alterity and for trying out techniques of interaction in intercultural encounters.
Focussing on religion, diplomacy, and drama, the project examines fields of cultural exchange that all share a theatrical quality and considers the interrelated performativity of religion and gender as well as national identities. Anglo-Ottoman exchange in particular lends itself to contributing to more recent models of cultural encounters that go beyond binary conceptions of self and other, as it is highly distinct from early modern cultural contact with the New World and took place within a heterogeneous network of intersecting ethnic groups, religions, and interests. Accordingly, the project focuses on the contingency of cultural contact as it is mediated in textual and visual representations. A performative model foregrounds the particular performances of those involved, the significance of speech acts, behaviour patterns, and rituals employed to come to terms with these first encounters. In the texts under discussion, positions are literally played out and range from total immersion into the other culture, which puts at risk the subject's specific identity, to complete rejection of the foreign, as it becomes manifest in expressions of disgust or acts of destruction. The choice of any particular model for coming to terms with the cultural encounter by those involved is of far-reaching consequences and may result in domination or partnership on eye-level, in violence or diplomacy, in misapprehension or understanding.

Performances of Religion in Anglo-Ottoman Encounters (Sabine Schülting)
While European colonial powers conquered, colonised and evangelised the »New World«, they were themselves threatened by the colonizing endeavours of the Ottoman Empire, which – in contrast to Christian Europe – guaranteed religious tolerance towards the diverse creeds and ethnicities it had brought together. As England's diplomatic and economic relations with the Ottoman Empire expanded, the young Protestant nation found itself in allegiance with the traditional enemy of Christianity but, by the same token, had a new possible ally against Catholic Spain. Yet this did not mitigate the strong fear of the conversion of English travellers and sailors, which underpinned the allegiance and turned into an obsession in England's cultural imagination: hence the expression »turning Turk«. Apostasy, implying both religious and political treachery, was considered to be a disturbing phenomenon accompanying international trade relations and was constructed as an effect of sexual aggression – be it through the seduction of a beautiful oriental woman or the threat to English manliness presented by circumcision or castration.
In its focus on the religious dimensions of cultural encounters this project does not only analyse the (supposedly) binary opposition between (Protestant) Christendom and Islam but also intends to disentangle the more complex web of multi-religious encounters in/with the Ottoman Empire. In this context, the relations between external form and inner conviction, between faith and ritual, which were at the centre of confessional controversies during the Counter Reformation, proved of vital importance. The project will focus especially on those moments within texts of different genres where the religious integrity of the European/Englishman is seen to be compromised through the recognition or confrontation with the practices of foreign religions. In those moments the intelligibility of the foreign rituals is at stake and any evaluation of the sincerity of religious creeds becomes problematic. The study of Anglo-Ottoman encounters will thus open up a perspective on the performative character of any religion and it stresses the disconcerting similarity between religious rites and the theatre.

Performing Englishness: Anglo-Ottoman go-betweens in early modern drama (Wibke Joswig and Sarah Sallmann)
The metaphor of the world as stage is both popular and powerful in early modern England. Titles of contemporary collections of maps such as John Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611) indicate that the geographical measuring out of the world is closely linked to its theatrical appropriation, and the leading theatre of the day is not only tellingly called The Globe but also welcomes the visitor with the revealing inscription totus mundus agit histrionem – »all the world's a stage«. Especially the East is understood as a stage of sorts on which English interests are acted out and England may put to the test its new role as global player. In this context, early modern plays about the East are particularly interesting: staging the theatrical encounter with the East in the theatrical medium of the play, they are instances of theatre about theatre, or meta-theatre. The theatrical medium of drama is especially apt to capture the theatricality of the cultural encounter, and the project analyses the strategies employed in the playwright's appropriation of the encounter with the East. This project holds that early modern Turk plays open up a space for quite literally playing out concepts of cultural and national identity, a pre-colonial space in which the hierarchies of imperial thought do not yet apply and identities still have to be established. They testify to a fascination with the possibilities opening up in the East while simultaneously exhibiting the fear of cultural contamination. The renegade marks the vanishing point of collective imagination: he becomes a representative of an English nation that harbours both dreams of Empire and fears of losing its identity in the process of early modern globalisation. Publicly staging the failure of turncoats who forget about their English roots, these plays stress the importance of loyalty to the nation and thus contribute considerably to the formation of an early modern English national identity. Yet, they also show that the Englishness of the merchants, pirates, mercenaries, and apostates involved does not stay unaffected by the encounter with the East. It is hence the guiding hypothesis of this project that the Anglo-Ottoman encounter is not so much a confrontation of two stable, readily-formed instances of identity (an English one and an Ottoman one), but that a specifically English identity is only shaped, and constantly re-shaped, in the encounter with the other. How this continual self-formation is negotiated in early modern drama is the focus of this project.
(Project member up to 09/2009: Ralf Hertel)

Early Modern English Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire (Sabine Lucia Müller)
Diplomacy is the orchestrated perpetuation of cultural encounters for the purpose of maintaining peace between states. An ambassador must always act out a »double role« in that he has the task of articulating the interests of his own state without offending the host country. Diplomatic reports by English observers portray embassies as »miniature courts«, thus emphasising the theatricality of the Ottoman exercise of power as well as foregrounding and reflecting their own performance. This project's approach seeks to examine the performativity of diplomacy in its specific forms, taking note of the functions of speech and body language used in order to understand the conditions of diplomatic success without ignoring the moments of its failure.
The actual, often drawn-out process of diplomacy – waiting to be received; the exchange of pleasantries, letters of recommendation and gifts, etc. – necessarily precedes diplomatic results. Only afterwards, such as with the report of a successful diplomatic mission, will these largely contingent processes become significant as teleologies. Studying English diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire since ca. 1580, illustrated in letters and reports described and re-staged by English ambassadors, the intricate processes of early modern diplomacy diplomacy can be more closely examined. Besides offering an analysis of Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy, this project aims to contribute to the field of postcolonial studies by expanding its approach to cultural encounters: considering a performative model of diplomacy, it strives to add to and to revise accounts of European and non-European contacts.

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