Literature’s Refuge and Modern Border Regime: A Book Talk with William Stroebel

The modern Middle East was born a century ago, when the Ottoman Empire was carved up into racialized borders. The Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923–1925 was the final nail in the empire’s coffin, uprooting and swapping nearly two million Christians and Muslims between Europe and West Asia. What stories can we salvage from this devastating history, and how can we retell them today?