Serkan Yolacan

Reflections Upon “New Civilizationisms”

I am interested in thinking with the concept of civilizationism in a minor key, as it comes through the writings and genres I study in Azerbaijan from an ethnographic-historical lens. One of these genres is a post-Soviet biographical anthology that melds the Soviet tradition of biography writing and the Islamic tradition of tezkirah writing. These texts cultivate historical sensibilities that unveil an expansive Caucasus intricately woven into multiple empires through scholarly, gnostic, or saintly traditions carried on the backs of mobile ancestors. Each anthology illuminates a specific set of places and persons, valorizing them over others. Together, they form a morally differentiated discursive terrain in which the former citizens of a Soviet state are recast as an eclectic society with diverse pasts in different countries. Studying the genre, the authorial practices, and the historical worlds conjured through these texts reveals a quiet undercurrent weaving in and out the more self-assured and assertive civilizationisms of neighboring countries—Turkey, Iran, and Russia. 

While the state-centric civilizational discourses of these three old neighbors with long imperial histories align easily with the hard fist of geopolitics, the subtler threads of equally grand visions emerging from their shared periphery, the Caucasus, are tethered to the soft touch of literary forms and older traditions of writing about places and personages within Islam. To appreciate it, we need to move from a state-centric imperial register to a borderland sensibility that opens to multiple empires. Attuned to picking up a gentle whistle amid boisterous marching bands, we might catch the echoes of an old Persianate cosmopolis overshadowed by Iran’s revolutionary geopolitics or a contemplative Turkish Sufi tradition lost in the rat-tat-tat of Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism, or even a hybrid Slav-Tatar world subdued within Russia’s neo-Eurasianism. 

Tuned in the minor key, could these civilizationisms open new vistas beyond strongmen politics, geopolitical competition, and cultural imperialism? Could they be pointing to an Old-World cosmopolitanism that is historically specific but not resolutely local? Geographically expansive but less than global? Exceeding and subverting the ambitions of any single state while being entangled with more than one? These are the possibilities I want to explore in this collaborative project.