Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries by Paul Manning (review)

Strangers in a Strange Land joins a growing number of recent studies of the historical formation of the Georgian intelligentsia over the course of the long nineteenth century. Viewed within the context of related works on the Georgian intelligentsia, especially Austin Jersild’s Orientalism and Empire, Stephan Jones’s Socialism in Georgian Colors, and multiple articles by Oliver Reisner, Strangers in a Strange Land stands out through its close attention to texts, its deft literary and linguistic analyses, its theoretical ambitions, and its wide-ranging implications for comparative analysis.¹ Over the course of its eight chapters, Strangers in a Strange Land charts the cognitive and semiotic terrains of the nineteenth-century Georgian intelligentsia through serial publications, feuilletons, ethnographies, fiction, and poetry.

Across the many genres and texts he engages, Paul Manning concentrates on what he calls, following Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, the “cultures of circulation” that shaped the emergence of Georgian print culture. Manning launches his account with Ilya Chavchavadze’s Letters of a Traveller (1861–71), a text that has been the subject of his earlier work,² but which he considerably expands on here. Strangers in a Strange Land then shifts into a series of close readings of the texts and genres that emerged from the newspapers Chavchavadze founded: Droeba (Times), a publication that functioned from “the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s [as] more or less the only Georgian newspaper” (P. 81), as well as its successor, Iveria, which ran from 1886 to 1891. Along the way, readers are introduced to multiple sectors of the Georgian intelligentsia, including ethnographers (Urbneli, Bavreli), poets (Akaki Tsereteli, Vazha Pshavela), and prose writers (Aleksandre Qazbegi). Manning’s framework reveals how a modern Georgian literary sensibility emerged first in ethnographic prose. The evidence Manning assembles to demonstrate his thesis that “virtually all the ‘mountain writers’ of the 1880s (Qazbegi, Vazha Pshavela, Urbneli) turned their hand first to ethnography” and only later embarked on literary careers (P. 306n17), significantly adds to our understanding of the temporal sequencing of genres in Georgian literary history.

In each of his eight chapters, Manning carefully and provocatively distinguishes the world of the Georgian intellectuals from their counterparts in Russia and Europe. He demonstrates how Georgians “positioned … on the borderline of European modernity and civilization” were only able to conceive of themselves as a public through “constant reference to the lack, the absence of civilizational progress which was due to the stubborn obduracy of the space of Asia” (P. 96). Situated in, but not of, Asia, the liberal Georgian intelligentsia inhabited the multiple contradictions of colonial modernity with varying degrees of accommodation and self-consciousness. Georgian intellectuals who cognized the contradictions that shaped their imagination more acutely than others, namely writers such as Qazbegi and other eulogizers of the vanishing life ways of mountainous Xevsuretia and Xevi, and the Christian ruins of Muslim Ajaria, stand out most memorably in Manning’s chronicle of the emergent Georgian public sphere.

The Georgian intellectuals who prove most central to Manning’s exposition inverted the sublime posturing of Russian Romantics who (as influentially documented by Harsha Ram) viewed the Caucasus landscape from the “neutral, almost invisible position of the road” (P. 67). Parting ways with while also building on the Russian Romantic tradition, Chavchavadze, Qazbegi, and the pseudonymous Bavreli (Droeba’s special correspondent to the newly conquered regions of Ottoman Georgia, whose real name was Soloman Aslanishvili) viewed the “road” from the landscape’s point of view (P. 67). Manning’s documentation of Georgian intellectuals’ inversions of the Romantic sublime will help scholars throughout the Eurasian cultural sphere inflect, deflect, and otherwise deploy the literary-theoretical legacy of reflection on the sublime in ways locally relevant to indigenous cultural spaces, and particularly to indigenous cultures encountering the infrastructures of technological modernity...