Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries

Manning examines the formation of nineteenth-century intelligentsia print publics in the former Soviet republic of Georgia both anthropologically and historically. At once somehow part of “Europe,” at least aspirationally, and yet rarely recognized by others as such, Georgia attempted to forge European style publics as a strong claim to European identity. These attempts also produced a crisis of self-definition, as European Georgia sent newspaper correspondents into newly reconquered Oriental Georgia, only to discover that the people of these lands were strangers. In this encounter, the community of “strangers” of European Georgian publics proved unable to assimilate the people of the “strange land” of Oriental Georgia. This crisis produced both notions of Georgian public life and European identity which this book explores.

Reviews of Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries

"This is a sophisticated exploration of the complex and often contradictory elements of nation-building and identity-formation in Georgia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Manning, has an extraordinary understanding of the subtleties of Georgian writing. Drawing on Gerogian newspapers, poetry, and short stories, and focusing on Georgia's encounters with Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, he weaves together a complex challenge to the familiar Western tropes of the imagined community. Manning has produced a novel theoretical contribution to our ideas about the role of intellectuals in national identity formation."–Stephen F. Jones ." . . The book promises to play a key role in the further development of Caucasian and Georgian studies, and it opens new territories for exploration and investigation by a hopefully expanded reading public or 'imagined community of scholars.' Particularly relevant here, Manning makes a major contribution by demonstrating how Georgians themselves put together many familiar tropes about the Caucasus stemming from the Russian 'geopoetic and geopolitics' of Romantic poetry and literature, including the 'imperial sublime' and the feminization of Orthodox Georgia as the 'oriental beauty'"–Julie A. Christensen "Slavic and East European Journal, 58.2 (Summer 2014) "