Uncanny History: Temporal Topology in the Post-Ottoman World

Post-Ottoman temporal topologies—cases where the past, , and future may be bent around one another rather than ordered linearly—may produce uncanny histories. The uncanny is activated, as Freud noted, when something secret comes to light, but also the expectations of a given genre are exceeded. In these cases, genre of historicism has been violated. Rather than contending that post-Ottoman world is entirely different from Western Europe, the here alert one to the presence of uncanny histories in many places since historicism has nowhere managed to eradicate its . Unsettled pasts of violence and displacement and presents by ongoing tensions (political, economic, religious/ethnic) do , however, to a particular vitality and saliency of uncanny in the post-Ottoman sphere.