A History of Clamor: Historical Time and the Late Ottoman Surreal

Abstract This essay examines a scene of late Ottoman parliamentary politics characterized by verbal disruption, raucous applause, and strident indignation: in short, clamor. Centered on the brief period in late 1918 following the empire’s exit from World War I but prior to the rise of the Turkish nationalist movement, the essay focuses on a moment shaped by remarkable uncertainty about how to narrate the political present—what aspects of the historical past remained relevant to defining a possible political future? It looks at the efforts of a Greek Orthodox deputy of parliament, Emmanouil Emmanouilidis, to rebuke the promise of the nearly century-long process of reform ( ıslahat ). As part of this effort, he also historicized the interruption of his own speech, identifying the traces of his own frailty of voice in the stenographic records from prior parliamentary sessions. Attention to noise requires a careful unpacking of seemingly contingent moments of communicative misfire, places where denotational discourse is disrupted and therefore unheard, or what speech act theorists have referred to as infelicities. I offer a critical reimagining of the concept of infelicity, attentive to Emmanouilidis’ own preoccupation with the historical weight assumed by the fact of being persistently drowned out by his colleagues. I contend that Emmanouilidis was challenging regnant assumptions about the historical unfolding of freedom in Ottoman political life. The essay argues for the importance of interrogating the labile and contested character of historical temporality at the end of empire.