Nicholas Doumanis

Myth and memory in the Mediterranean : remembering fascism's empire

Acknowledgements - Abbreviations - Glossary - Introduction - Historical Background - Italys Aegean Possession - Popular Dissent - The Poetics of Nationalism - Colonialism and Modernity - Italian Colonialism, Italian Character - Epilogue - Appendix - Bibliography

DURABLE EMPIRE: STATE VIRTUOSITY AND SOCIAL ACCOMMODATION IN THE OTTOMAN MEDITERRANEAN

Subjects of the sultan: culture and daily life in the Ottoman empire . By Suraiya Faroqhi. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Pp. x+358. ISBN 1-86064-289-6. £35.00. The Ottoman empire and early modern Europe . By Daniel Goffman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+273. ISBN 0-5214-59087. £15.99. A shared world: Christians and Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean . By Molly Greene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+228. ISBN 0-619-00898-1.

Italians as “Good” Colonizers: Speaking Subalterns and the Politics of Memory in the Dodecanese

29.50. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab world: the roots of sectarianism . By Bruce Masters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+222. ISBN 0-521-803330. £48.00. Consumption studies and the history of the Ottoman empire, 1560–1922: an introduction . Edited by Donald Quataert. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. vii+358. ISBN 0-7914-4431-7.

Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and Its Destruction in Late-Ottoman Anatolia

25.50. The Ottoman empire, 1700–1922 . Second edition. By Donald Quataert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii+212. ISBN 0-521-839106. £40.00. Since Edward Said first launched his devastating critique of western scholarship on the Islamic world, it has been almost impossible to think of Orientalism as anything other than a euphemism for the systematic distortion of an exotic Other. That imaginings of a fanciful ‘Orient’ are now recognized as providing acute expositions of western pathologies, of references to deep-seated desires and anxieties so disturbing that they only reveal themselves in alterities, goes some way towards explaining the sheer bulk of interdisciplinary publications that have been directly inspired by Saids Orientalism .1 As reflexive phenomena, however, such publications have even less to say about the real ‘Orient’. Rather, the historical reconstruction of Orientalisms ostensible subject has been left to a separate and less conspicuous stream of scholarship that is characterized by painstaking archival research.

A History of Greece

Italian colonialism has had an ambivalent place in Dodecanesian collective memory.1 Almost all local written representations, whether found in history books, commemorative albums, magazines, scholarly journals, newspaper articles or published memoirs, have read the Italian period as a nationalist struggle against unremitting fascist oppression.2 Many ordinary Dodecanesians recall the Italian period in a manner that accords faithfully with this Greek nationalist line, including self-conscious patriots who were ardently (though not necessarily actively) opposed to the colonizer’s presence. Others that somehow came to harm because of Italian rule, such as fishermen and merchants who were denied operating permits so as not to compete with Italian competitors, or peasants displaced by Italian colonization programs, would also find it meaningful to interpolate their experiences within the nationalist schema. Yet Dodecanesians are also likely to claim that “the Italians were good” (I Itali itan hali), and that they bequeathed an invaluable legacy to the region. Even those who suffered at Italian hands could nevertheless talk approvingly of colonial administrative practices, development schemes, and about the Italians “as people.” When comparing foreign powers that left their mark on the region, as the islanders often do, the Italians, unlikely as it might seem to outsiders, are deemed to have been “good.”