Seminar Course Presentation, April the 30th

Safiye Türker

Nükhet Varlık, “Orienal Plague” or Epidemiological Orientalism? Revisiting the Plague Episteme of
the Early Modern Mediterranean.

Basic concepts: Orientalism, oriental plague, epidemiological orientalism, oriental healthspace,

epidemiological fronts, epidemiological epistemiologies, environmental history

International Sanitary Conferences

In 1851, when the first International Sanitary Conference opened, the face of Europe wore a very
different aspect from that of today. The twelve participating governments were those of Austria,
France, Great Britain, Greece, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Turkey (then officially known as " the Sublime
Port ") and of four Sovereign States that were shortly afterwards to combine to form a united Italy-
the Kingdoms of Sardinia and of the Two Sicilies, the Papal States, and Tuscany. The borders of
Sardinia then extended as far north as to include part of what is now a suburb of Geneva. This was
essentially the Europe as mapped out by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Opening the 1851
Conference, the French Foreign Minister referred to the International Exhibition in London in the
same year as heralding a new age of industrial cooperation between nations. In the same year also,
telegraphic communications were established between London and Paris.

For the text and the images: Norman Howard Jones, The Scientific Background of the International
Sanitary Conferences 1851-1938, World Health Organization, Geneva, 1975
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sanitary_Conferences

https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/contagion?utm_source=library.harvard

QUESTIONS

1. What is the departure point of Varlık in this article?

2. What sort of methodology does she apply?
3. What are the primary sources of this study?
4. What is the main argument of Varlık in this article?
5. How could the plague phenomenon become a part of Orientalism according to Varlık?
6. Why is the 19th century so decisive in the making of epidemiological orientalism?
7. In which way does the new scholarship provoke us to revise the episteme of plague?
8. What is the impact of epidemiological orientalism on historiography (especially modern
historiography and also on Turkish historiography)?
9. How does the landscapes transform to “healthscapes”?
10. Why does Varlık claim that being of the Ottoman landscape the repository of plague is just a
discursive formation?
11. How does Varlık illustrate or examplify the functioning of Oriental plague discourse in the
case of the description of the Ottoman lanscape?