System Crisis and Theater in the Ottoman Empire: Representation of the Late Ottoman System Crisis in Theatrical Plays by Fırat Güllü (review)

408 Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4.2 family and its role in shaping late Ottoman architecture to be invaluable to scholars interested in Ottoman, Armenian, or architectural history. Lydia Harrington Boston University doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.4.2.10 Fırat Güllü. System Crisis and Theater in the Ottoman Empire: Repre­ sentation of the Late Ottoman System Crisis in Theatrical Plays. Istanbul: Libra Books, 2017. 160 pp. 60 TL. ISBN: 978-6052380024. Fırat Güllü is among the very few researchers who have been working on the history and practice of theater in the late Ottoman Empire. Professionally a history instructor, he formerly contributed to the field with a monograph in addition to several translations and articles. System Crisis and Theater in the Ottoman Empire is based on the master’s thesis he defended under the supervision of Şevket Pamuk at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University. The book’s scope is narrower than the title suggests. It is basically a comparison of responses by two Ottoman intellectuals of different ethnic origins to the system crisis the Ottoman Empire went through in the nineteenth century, as represented in a single piece by each. The authors in question are Şemsettin Sami (1850–1904), an Albanian polymath, who through his work played a leading role in the construction of both Albanian and Turkish national identities , and Hagop Baronian (1843–91), an Armenian satirist who exerted enormous influence on later generations in Armenian writing. Şemsettin Sami’s play, Gave (1877), was inspired by Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and took its story from history. Baronian’s Honorable Beggars, however, was serialized in 1880–81 and then adapted into a play by Jack Antressian, exactly a century later, in 1980. Güllü based his interpretation not on the serialized narrative but on the adaptation. The book’s theoretical and conceptual framework has three components: theories of system crises, Ottoman historiography, and the representation of history in literature. First, the author gives a brief historical account of how system crises were interpreted, beginning with liberal thinkers such as Adam Smith, then the Marxist tradition, and Talcott Parsons. Güllü adopts the theory of Jürgen Habermas, which he considers to be a synthesis of the preceding approaches. He then goes on to depict the established historiography of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire with reference to historians such as Halil İnalcık and Bernard Lewis. This historiography is then updated with the help of later generations of historians like Erik Jan Zürcher and François Book Reviews    409 Georgeon and, based on this update, a justification of the author’s present work is offered. The history of the late Ottoman Empire has not been discussed from the perspective of a systemic crisis whereas it went through two serious crises during the nineteenth century. These accounts on theory and historiography are complemented by a section where the author deals with the question of representing history through literature. The guides in this part are Franco Moretti, Doritt Cohn, and Erol Köroğlu. The author thus explains the concepts he used in his work and prepares the reader for a close reading of the texts. In the second half of the book he analyzes the texts by first supplying short biographies of the authors, then detailed stories and plots of the plays, followed by his interpretations. He emphasizes the differences, as well as the similarities, in the responses by these two leading intellectuals to the crisis in the empire which were unfortunately never taken seriously by the authorities. System Crisis and Theater in the Ottoman Empire is particularly noteworthy for a number of reasons. It is a good effort within a dying field, namely Turkish drama and theatre, to begin with. For decades there has been almost no serious scholarly work that adopts a conceptual and theoretical framework to analyze Ottoman/Turkish theatrical performances, with the notable exceptions of Daryo Mizrahi (offering an anthropological perspective on the puppet theatre performances in Ottoman Istanbul), Beliz Güçbilmez (suggesting an explanation, based on painting, for the appropriation of Western dramatic style by modern Turkish playwrights), and Mehmet...