FSP3 - Ottoman Auralities Seminar : Adam Mestyan - A Circular History of French Operetta in the Ottoman Mediterranean: The Adventures of Seraphin Manasse (1860s-1880s)

13. Mai | 15:00

A Circular History of French Operetta in the Ottoman Mediterranean:  The Adventures of Seraphin Manasse (1860s-1880s)

This talk connects microhistory, biography, and the music business in the late Ottoman Empire through the story of Seraphin Manasse (Manasyan), an Ottoman Armenian composer and impresario. He is one of the main figures through which Istanbul, Cairo, and Ottoman port cities received French operetta in the growing musical market between the early 1860s and late 1880s. His troupes and adventures exemplify an entrepreneurial spirit which considered Ottoman cities as a market of Western European musical arts. I conclude by probing the limits of Ottoman musical cosmopolitanism through Manasse’s constant failures.

Bio: Adam Mestyan is a historian of the modern Arab world. He is Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Middle East Studies Center and the Islamic Studies Center at Duke University. Currently, he works on two monographs: a new imperial history of the Middle East and another one connecting business and environmental history through the story of the sugar industry in modern Egypt. His previous works include Modern Arab Kingship – Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023), Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Ifao, 2021) and Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Kontakt

Nazan Maksudyan
maksudyan  ( at )  cmb.hu-berlin.de

Ort