ABSTRACTS

1^st PANEL: NAIPAUL AND RUSHDIE

Tüzün (Bahçeşehir U):

Naipaul’s Subjective Vision: Questions of Location, Authority and Legitimacy

Although V.S. Naipaul describes himself as existing in multiple cultures simultaneously and frequently foregrounds his exilic status, his books often betray his complicity with Western modes of representation and thus situate him within the representational economy of metropolitan culture. Thus, Naipaul is frequently cited as a prime example of the non-Western intellectual whose books as well as public declamations expose a deeply Eurocentric bias against peoples of the developing world despite his own third world origins.

This paper aims to identify the main dimensions of Naipaul’s subjective vision with particular emphasis on the ways it informs his artistic and philosophical/political outlook. Although I primarily concentrate on the main components of Naipaul’s subjective vision, I examine these in relation to the wider and related questions of agency, authority and legitimacy that emanate from Naipaul’s particular situatedness. In trying to account for the complexities and problematics of Naipaul’s vision, I investigate the origins and implications of Naipaul’s fear of extinction, his contested status as an exile, and the burdens of identity he grapples with. Naipaul’s intellectual authority as an interpreter of the Third World as well as the legitimacy of his travel narratives that convey his vision are highly contested given the difficulty of pinpointing Naipaul’s cultural allegiances. Rather than explaining the contours of Naipaul’s vision with reference to one influence or another, I argue that Naipaul’s vision is formed by the combination and interaction of adopted Western paradigms, inherited Hindu sensibilities and the idiosyncrasies of his temperament. Consequently, Naipaul is far from simply being the unconstrained voice of exile that he frequently claims to be, yet neither is his work solely or exclusively determined by the intellectual traditions he inherited, his Hindu upbringing or his acquired British sensibilities. His writing, and his travel writing in particular, display his precarious situatedness between his ancestral/native and adopted homelands and is largely informed by the complex intellectual/epistemological interplay between the two.

Tekin (Atılım U):

Salman Rushdie: The Placeless Migrant, and Mediator Meditating between East and West

In Istanbul Memories and the City Orhan Pamuk categorizes Conrad, Nabokov and Naipaul as the “writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations” (6). To Pamuk, what nourishes the creative powers of these writers is “rootlessness”. Contrary to the above writers, Pamuk’s imagination is fed by the idea of belonging to one single place, namely Istanbul. The bond between Pamuk and Istanbul is indispensable, even vital to his literary needs as suggested by the writer’s “own words”, Istanbul’s fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am” (6) Within this context, where to situate Salman Rushdie’s fiction is worth considering because Rushdie fits neither of Pamuk’s categories. Is it possible to regard Rushdie’s fiction as a representative of Third World literature? Does his work belong to the Western mainstream? Where does Rushdie belong to? East or West? Rushdie appears to be both the migrant and the one who belongs, whose literary career has been built not only on the concept of cultural migrancy but also on the idea of belonging. Rushdie’s uniqueness is the result of his, what might be called “placelessness”. He is in between the two cultures, i.e. east and west, belonging to neither, yet in full command of both. Shailja Sharma’s comment on the variety of Rushdie’s sources explains the multi-cultural dimensions of his work: “The deliberately hybrid, mongrel, multireferential nature of the literary and experiential inheritance that Rushdie claims, nut just from East and West but from all corners of the world…”(Sharma,604). As a leading non-British writer, Rushdie serves the international migrancy of English language; he is the cultural transmitter, the mediator between East and West. Accordingly, the aim of this paper will be twofold: on the one hand, to define Rushdie’s exact stance between East and West; and on the other, to investigate his various uses of the English language as a tool to appeal to both Eastern and Western readers. In this respect, the paper will focus particularly on Rushdie’s ways of bridging the gap between the two polarised civilisations.

2^nd PANEL: ENGLISH IN TURKEY

Engin and York (Bilkent U):

Embracing levels of enstrangement in the study of English Literature in Turkish schools

In private Turkish schools, English is often taught through the study of English literature. Texts from Shakespeare to Rowling are used as a vehicle for language and cultural input, and as a stimulus for critical thinking. By the end of their high school education, many Turkish students will be able to discuss with confidence English literature; some of them will go on to teach English through literature themselves. Most English teachers in Turkey are Turkish native speakers who have learnt their English in Turkey, and have been trained in Turkey. This pattern is repeated generation after generation, and similar texts are taught in similar ways in thousands of schools, often without questioning the necessity or effectiveness of including English literature in the curriculum.

It could be argued that there are four possible areas of unfamiliarity for newly qualified teachers. These are:

1. Unfamiliarity of setting – temporal, spatial and cultural

2. Unfamiliarity of language

3. Unfamiliarity of English Literature

4. Unfamiliarity of Literature

These levels of unfamiliarity may cause enstrangement, or may in fact be embraced by newly qualified teachers as a means for learning and developing themselves. This presentation will examine perceptions of the current state of English Literature in Turkish classrooms. It will be based on narratives of newly qualified Turkish teachers of English who have just been through a five-year combined Literature and Pedagogy course at Bilkent University. Insights will be offered into the following questions:

1. What factors influence the choice of texts in Turkish schools?
2. To what extent are the aims of teaching literature literary or linguistic?
3. What are student needs and expectations in terms of literary and linguistic input?
4. To what extent can a non-native teacher of English give the cultural input necessary for students to fully appreciate the English text?
5. How does the above impact on the confidence of the Turkish teacher?
6. Is there a case for re-examining the place of English literature in the Turkish classroom?

Gürle (Boğaziçi U):

Stream of Consciousness a la Turca: Atay’s reading of Joyce in The Disconnected

This paper explores how Joyce’s voice echoes in a particularly memorable instance in the history of modern Turkish novel, Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected -1971).

Atay’s novel is distinctly of his own, but on some level, it is a response to Joyce’s Ulysses; a quite singular and a very Turkish response. Any review of The Disconnected begins with the humble acknowledgment of the novel’s vast frame of reference, the great variety of voices and styles that it presents, and finally its resistance to being translated into another language. The Disconnected stands out among other Turkish novels of the time not only because it presents a critical attitude towards the country’s project of modernization, but also because of the variety of colloquialisms, idiosyncrasies, verbal conventions, local jokes, and newspeak it employs in voicing this criticism.

This article focuses on specific references to Joyce’s style in The Disconnected, including a very interesting adaptation of his signature use of stream of consciousness (as in Molly’s soliloquy), while also underlining other parallelisms between the two novels, such as the multi-voiced and multi-styled narrative structure they are built upon. Drawing centrally upon the work of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, it not only demonstrates how Atay coped with the authority of Joyce while building a new structure upon it, but also establishes that the awareness of the echoes from the past is central to the work of both authors.

The main objective of this comparative study is, therefore, to demonstrate what makes Atay the Turkish counterpart of Joyce is an ability to draw upon the literary past and deliver it to the present in an enriched form.

KEYNOTE Boehmer (U of Oxford):

Postcolonial Theorists in Practice: Gandhi and Mandela

Set within a broad transnational framework, this paper will explore the political and ethical intertextuality from Gandhi to Mandela in the 1940-1960 period, looking in particular at the implications for Mandela's passive resistance approach of the influence from Gandhi.

3^rd PANEL: NEW NATIONS OF ANGLOPHONE WRITING

Melikoğlu (Freie U):

Englishness, Japaneseness, or Universalism? Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Japanese” and “English” Novels

According to a widely-held view, Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro wrote his best-known novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which with its butler protagonist appeared to many as an epitome of Englishness, partly as a reaction to one type of reception of his earlier, Japanese-set novels. This reception insisted on identifying in the author’s style “typically Japanese” characteristics, such as “the understated, elegant but significant gesture, similar to the deft brushwork of Japanese paintings” (Bruce King). It has to date been overlooked to what extent the English-set The Remains of the Day refers back to Ishiguro’s previous, “Japanese” novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which is set in his country of birth. The parallels go so far that certain passages in the two works must be regarded as analogues of each other. Remains is in many ways a rewriting of Artist that adapts the guilt problematics of Japan in the era around WW II to British circumstances of the same and a somewhat later period.

This paper will trace the analogues between the two novels and explore how this kind of intertextuality is used to make a case for the universality of Ishiguro’s themes. Among the parallels that will be discussed are, apart from the common theme of private and political guilt, the fact that in Remains Ishiguro endows the English narrator’s speech with features of the Japanese language; that post-war Japan shapes its cultural output such that it presents no hindrance to reception as “charmingly Japanese” by the now influential US taste – just as in Suez Crisis Britain Americans seek “charmingly English” estates as status symbols; and a number of common motifs. It will be argued that in keeping with his frequently stated “universalist” agenda, Ishiguro’s “Japanese” novels are no more Japanese than his “English” novel is English – which is not to say that the “Japanese” novels could not occasionally be more English than Ishiguro is aware.

Randall (Bilkent U):

Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns: Anglophone writing as littérature engagée

In noting “the extraordinary international migrancy of English-language writers and their texts”, the conference’s call for papers raises questions about the politics of international and intercultural relations in the contemporary world order. Such questions will be addressed, in my paper, in relation to Khaled Hosseini’s mammoth bestseller A Thousand Splendid Suns. Although a work of fiction written in English, the novel has become in a short time the mostly widely read document on the series of crises that have shaped Afghan actuality for three decades.

Hosseini intends his work to have a significant political impact upon our contemporary world. His literary production and its circulation are part of his overall work of spurring aid for Afghanistan. Although Splendid Suns is understandably polemical, its targeted adversary is not Islam (as one might expect) but patriarchy. Its success, unfortunately, is compromised both aesthetically and politically. The compromise arises out of Hosseini’s peculiarly self-contradicting presentation of human “resilience”. While documenting the shocking abuse of women by men in the main body of his narrative, Hosseini is guided by a sense of limited resilience: damage, physical and psychological, needs in many instances to be understood as permanent and irremediable. Yet the novel’s resolution, a happy ending only slightly tarnished by residual trauma, shows the main characters (those who are still alive) already in advanced processes of personal recovery. The novel is thus caught between incommensurable demands arising from its author’s political commitments. The novel needs to excite intensely sympathetic response, and suffering and damage need therefore to be something more than the commonplace troubles a person learns to live through. However, the novel must also serve as a spur to political action, and cannot ultimately consign its characters to life-situations that are beyond hope, beyond help, past care.

4^th PANEL: SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE

Barker (UNISA): cannot attend

Bennette (Bilkent U):

The Narrative of Space and Belonging in Christopher Hope’s The Love Songs of Nathan J. Swirsky

Christopher Hope’s collection of satirical, tragicomic short stories, The Love Songs of Nathan J. Swirsky, was initially broadcast on radio, and touches on some of the persistent themes in white South African writing. Composed in the early nineties and set in the first years of the Apartheid era, Hopes’ stories portray the bigoted mindset of the new settlers of white suburbia as they strive to take root in a housing estate outside Johannesburg that is reserved for Europeans only. The estate becomes a gathering point for all the ethnic outsiders and marginalized misfits of South African society: Swirsky, a character reminiscent of the wandering Jew, the albino, Reggie the leper, Salisbury the cripple, and the ostracized Afrikaner lady with her garden boy lover. Within this carnivalesque pot pouri of people and place, Hope creates a corrosive, humorous space without diluting the tragic or totally compromising the moral. This is achieved through an estranged polyphonic discourse where the main voice is that of a child story teller who innocently sees his world without the tainted vision of his elders. The author also uses the geographical and moral separation of the white community to set in motion a narrative interplay of absence and presence that enlivens the comic, alludes to the ironic, without allowing the forlorn and lamentable to be forgotten.

5^th PANEL: POLITICS OF ETHNICITY AND RACE

Fertile (Camosun College):

Immigrant and Indigenous Use of English in Literature in Canada

Canada is largely a nation of immigrants for whom English (or French, but I'll confine my topic to English) becomes the language of discourse. Regarding the indigenous peoples of Canada, English was forced upon the people through the residential school system, and so "post-colonial" is not a term that should be applied. English thus becomes dominant for both the original inhabitants and the newcomers to Canada--and that fact has effects that are both similar and
different in these two groups. Language as a cultural marker is a given—and when language is forced upon a people (either by economic measures as in the
case of immigrants) or by force (as in the case of indigenous peoples), how the culture adapts and responds is in large part a measure of its power.

Immigrant groups in Canada (apart from the Japanese, for example) have been successful in retaining their native tongues; indigenous peoples have not. In particular, I wish to explore how these two disparate groups have used English as a literary language and investigate the different relationships these groups have with English as a literary tool.

Manocha (U of Toronto):

The Inevitable Race Plot: Escaping Race Barriers in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

A recent surge in critical attention to the work of ‘other’ or peripheral modernisms has opened up the modernist canon or at least reconceptualized its origins as not exclusively Western. Whether this reconfiguration of the canon is accomplished through the adoption of a global modernist frame that considers texts spatially or geographically or, perhaps, the frame of cultural parataxis as a way to counter claims of a hierarchical historicity, the issue of race remains one that frequently enters critical discussions of other modernisms. When dealing with the works of modernist Anglo-Indian writers, race, imperialism and post-colonial discussions are almost inevitable. Even in the work of black writers of the Harlem Renaissance, writing out of a western metropolis like New York, discussions about representations of race are ubiquitous. Though racial otherness is a material concern—it is significant and often central to the work of alternative modernisms—critical response seems to be wholly absorbed in this issue.

I want to suggest that the critical tendency to almost exclusively evoke the race telos can be (or has already become) a confining assumption; it is assumed that the goal of other modernisms is to pursue a discourse of race that is often read as race-liberation. My paper will attempt to reread the texts of two very different kinds of ‘other’ modernisms: the modernism of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) as an African American author and the modernism of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) as an Anglo-Indian writer. The deliberate choice to use two different kinds of alterity here is to illustrate that race can be used inside and outside of the west in ways other than to pursue the subject of race socially or politically. I will go one step further to suggest that both Untouchable and Quicksand, in fact, can be read free of race. That is, both texts engage with alterity in ways that attempt to liberate them from the rhetoric of alterity.

6^th PANEL: NAIPAUL AND RUSHDIE II

Kennedy (Bilkent U):

Naipaul and the Construction of Ideas of England and Englishness in The Enigma of Arrival

Although few of his works are set in England, certain ideas of ‘Englishness’ have a central place in the work of V. S. Naipaul. The Enigma of Arrival, which is the most significant of Naipaul’s works to be set largely in England, in rural Wiltshire, can be seen, among other things, as a meditation on Englishness where fantasy plays a major role. The vision of Englishness in the novel draws on a tradition of English literature including Goldsmith, Gray, and Dickens, as well as on the fantasies about England which Naipaul had as a child in Trinidad. At one point Naipaul declares that as a child he ‘fitted [his] own fantasies’ to those of Dickens and so ‘was able with him to enter the dark city of London’ (145). Yet when Naipaul arrives in London, thinking he has come to a place he knows well, he finds ‘a city that was strange and unknown’, since it does not fit his preconceived notions of the ‘metropolitan’. What is more, he loses ‘the gift of fantasy, the dream of the future, the far-off place where I was going’ (146). But in rural Wiltshire, in the cottage on the edge of a large estate, the fantasy of Englishness is recreated through Naipaul’s interaction with the landscape, including the manor house and grounds, in what Rob Nixon has called ‘postcolonial pastoral’ (London Calling 161). The paper will examine the version of Englishness created in The Enigma of Arrival through Naipaul’s recreation of the English landscape in terms of his own memories and fantasies.

Altan (Beykoz Lojistik Meslek Yüksekokulu):

Midnight’s Children and Dialogism

In the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Judith Butler’s ideas this paper will try to identify the ways in which the dialogic quality of language works as a key to the deprivileging of absolute, authoritarian discourses in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children. The novel most clearly resembles Bakhtin’s category of the novel in its heteroglossic, multilinguistic nature. Language proliferates in the book, at all levels (Connor 292). The paper will argue to what extent language is used to challenge the narrative of the totalitarian government that seeks the condition of absolute monologue (Holquist 25). It will also explore the Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism and heteroglossia in relation to the dialogic configuration of subjectivity in Midnight’s Children. In its continuous dialogue with the official narrative of India, the novel not only records the historical events, but also parodies them through the voice of Saleem Sinai, who is “mysteriously handcuffed to history” (9). Subjects continually perform identities that are prescribed by hegemonic discourses. For Butler, performativity interrogates implicit norms within enunciations of ‘identity’ and recognizes it as a process of identification, something that is done over and over again instead of something that is an inherent characteristic of the individual. In view of that the paper will argue that as a historically constructed subject, Saleem becomes a key site in which parody turns into an act of subversive appropriation of identity formation that the voice of the official narrative of India imposes on him.

KEYNOTE Boehmer (U of Oxford):

Plotting conviviality in the contact zone, London 1910

At the height of empire, in the 1880-1920 period, how involved was Britain with India its largest and most populous imperial possession, on British home ground? What contribution did the numerous South Asian students, travellers, political reformers, radicals, poets, economists in London, Oxford, Edinburgh, Bristol, Cambridge, and elsewhere make to British social and cultural life in this period? Did they occupy some exotic fringe of the society, or was their involvement far more intensive, imbricated and transformative than has previously been presumed?

In this paper I will discuss the presence in Britain from 1870 to the First World War, but especially in the ‘litmus’ year of 1910, of numerous Indians, and their friendships and collaborations with British writers, artists, and intellectuals. I will be particularly interested in the ways in which they inflected ideas of Britishness, citizenship, empire, home and abroad, on British soil itself.

7^th PANEL: RELOCATIONS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Carbajal (U of Leeds):

Unframing Princely India: The Legacy of E. M. Forster’s Liberal Humanism in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust

This paper moves beyond familiar critical comparisons (such as those by Sujit Mukherjee and Yasmine Gooneratne) between Forster’s autobiographical work The Hill of Devi (1953) and Jhabvala’s Booker-prize winning novel Heat and Dust (1975). The paper suggests that Forster’s book, which attempts an intimate portrait of the Maharajah of Dewas Senior, finds a valuable and complex legacy in Jhabvala’s novel. Forster’s liberal-humanist investment in international friendship proves ultimately flawed: due to the impossibility of portraying such libellous issues as homosexuality and court scandals, Forster’s book presents a Rajah who seems beyond comprehension and yet remains tightly bound within Forster’s constrained depiction, which offers us a meek and helpless ruler. I propose that the shortcomings of the book nearly turn it into an exercise of what David Cannadine has called ‘Ornamentalism’. However, this paper reaches beyond interpretations such as Richard Cronin’s, which assembles Forster’s private memoirs to discredit the Rajah. By contrast, I argue that Jhabvala’s novel makes the most of the weaknesses and blank spaces of Forster’s book. Forster’s most manifest legacy in Jhabvala’s novel is the Nawab of Khatm, whom Jhabvala empowers by rendering him cryptic and obscure, and therefore resistant to clear framing. In addition, I argue Jhabvala’s vision of India becomes more quintessential when she treads beyond unscripted paths, such as the poor parts of contemporary India. I conclude that Devi acts as both an enabling source for Jhabvala’s approach to Princely India and a fruitful point of departure for her exploration of postcolonial issues of framing and representation. Hence, Jhabvala’s postcolonial revisitation of the Indian past is highly informed by the legacies of Forster’s liberal-humanist gaze.

Majumdar (Whitman College):

Accumulating Returns: Revision and Relocation in Braithwaite’s ‘Xango’

This paper explores the idea of the return as a trope for revision and relocation in Braithwaite’s “Xango.” Through the metaphor of Xango, a numinous figure for the African diaspora (and for diasporas, at large), the poem interrogates tensions between the authentic and whole, on the one hand, and the partial and performative, on the other; between metaphor and literalism; between modernity and orthodoxy; and between departure and arrival.

This interrogation expresses itself via a displaced, disembodied voice, trying to re-place (relocate) and recover its lost power in verses that express illicit desire and visual metaphors for the disruption of belonging and of racial unity. The exercise functions proleptically, announcing a recuperation of racial and individual pride as already achieved in its very articulation. However, the return is also imagined in rage and melancholy, which propel the text’s desire for Xango’s appearance and which Braithwaite acknowledges through various visual manipulations, particularly in his use of blank space as an index of absence. Even as the text accretes various mythic figures into the figure of Xango, it disturbs the bravado and hyperbole of its announcement of Xango’s return.

Simultaneously, the poem’s subversive, global affiliations with a series of figures announce diffuse, dispersed points of resistance for displaced populations. As such, these affiliations declare the possibility of multiple, accumulating—but always metaphorical—returns for Xango. This move underscores the text’s reluctant recognition of the fused urgency and impossibility of return. Further, it disturbs the notion that a return constitutes a literal arrival at a (geographical or temporal) point of departure.

8^th PANEL: ENGLISHNESS AND IMPERIALISM

Hope (Ankara U):

Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Decomposition of Englishness

Jean Rhys’s 1966 “revisiting” of Jane Eyre is also a revisiting of Thornfield Hall, the central gothic edifice of Charlotte Brontë’s novel. While the narrative returns to the English country house that is the setting of the earlier work, it also offers fragmentary glimpses of its structure as it is decomposed, reorganized and projected across the later novel’s Caribbean landscape. Indeed, this revisiting of an earlier structure now segmented, reordered and reassembled epitomizes the mode in which several key topoi of the earlier novel are reiterated and revised in the second, including, crucially, the question of national and imperial identity.

The second novel ultimately returns us to the third floor of Thornfield, the gothic narrative’s reserve of surplus memory, a museum, I will argue, of Englishness, and also, symbolically, a place for the consigning of troublesome imperial recollections. As Rhys’s novel revisits the national archive, the signs of Englishness are recalled and recirculated, revived in order to live a (seemingly) belated second life in which disaggregated tokens of nation assume a lively postcolonial recalcitrance toward imperial order. Yet the reconstruction of the earlier text is also caught in the traumatic mode of compulsive repetition, and, as Thornfield appears destined for a second time to be consumed by flames, the insurrectionary kindling of a colonial counter-narrative ends once again in the imminent conflagration of the archive (and of Bertha Mason, its chief archivist).

Rhys’s novel offers an analysis of Brontë’s narrative edifice in terms of what, after Derrida, we might call imperial “archive fever.” Furthermore, read tendentiously as an allegory of postcolonial resignification, it suggests a possible theoretical paradigm for understanding a postcolonial vacillation between overinvestment in imperial memory and the gleeful unleashing of “antimnemonic” forces.

Tokdemir (Middle East Technical U):

The English and the Others in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

As William C. Dowling notes, “To imagine a story… is to imagine the society in which it is told” (as qtd. in Kutzer xiii). Thus, even if the story is a fantastic one for children, one can hardly expect to read a text utterly devoid of ideologies, national values and images. In fact, this argument is maybe even more valid for children’s literature because the genre has usually been cherished as a means of conveying morals, culture and national identity. Acknowledged as a “master storyteller”, the distinguished writer of His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman, also communicates his view of England and Englishness; the writer does - or can - not fully disengage himself from the cultural values that nurtured him. Defined as the modern version of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, His Dark Materials presents the adventures of Lyra and Will who wander through parallel universes and find themselves amidst the second heavenly war, this time between the Authority and Lord Asriel. Throughout their journey, the protagonists become acquainted with various lands and communities. In this paper I argue that Pullman’s definition of Englishness means coming “into contact with ‘English soil’… [and] English schools” (Baucom 17). In this alternative world, what defines the English characters, and separates them from the others is one central place: the Jordan College. For Lyra’s world, Pullman envisions an alterative Oxford, where there is the grand Jordan College which is the only constant at the center of everything and is the representative of Englishness. As opposed to the English who are attached to Jordan College, the writer also depicts other nations who are completely detached from this English school and are thus “different”. Pullman depicts the Gyptians who live at sea, the Tartars who live in the North, and the Turks, who are not a part of the storyline yet mentioned briefly, to give the contrast between the English and the others. This paper aims to explore Pullman’s views of England and Englishness, and how they are discussed in his His Dark Materials by comparing the presentation of the Jordan College and its followers against the Gyptians, the Tartars, and the Turks.