Abstract

In recent years, the nature of cultural mediation in colonial and imperial settings has attracted renewed scholarly attention. This dissertation expands the chronological, geographical, and analytical framework for understanding mediation by focusing on trans-imperial subjects, men and women who straddled and brokered political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It explores how early modern Mediterranean trans-imperial subjects---colonial émigrés, redeemed slaves, converts, and Christian and Jewish Ottoman subjects in Venetian service---articulated geopolitical and ethnolinguistic categories. By examining the links between changing notions of "East" and "West," specific groups of trans-imperial intermediaries, and their institutional settings, this dissertation underscores intermediaries' dynamic and active role in fixing the boundaries of the objects they purport to mediate, rather than simply bringing into contact pre-existing, immutable, and disparate civilizations. The dissertation thus contributes to the literature on the making of Europe and its Others. Moreover, it traces the genealogy of our own analytical vocabulary of mediation, "hybridity," and "indigeneity" to early modern colonization, state formation and imperial rivalry in the Mediterranean.

The dissertation consists of four parts; the first three deal each with a specific trans-imperial group, while the fourth considers the interactions among them. Part I addresses the growing role of commercial brokers in institutionalizing ideas of brokering foreignness in Venice. Part II considers how different conversion narratives articulated the notion of transformation of Other into Self, as well as converts' socialization in and lifelong ties with the Pia Casa dei Catecumeni (Holy House of the Catechumens). Part III reconstructs the emergence of a highly endogamous and powerful group of dragomans (diplomatic interpreters) in Venetian service in Istanbul, and charts how they articulated for their patrons the relation between Ottomans and Venetians. Finally, Part IV focuses on several interactions between these various groups to highlight how traps-imperial life trajectories, social ties, and institutions were constitutive of notions of difference. By tracing the genealogy of categories such as "Turks" and "Levantines," it demonstrates how the defining properties and prototypical centers of these categories shifted historically as traps-imperial mediation became institutionalized.*

*This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Adobe Acrobat.