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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters, written from Turkey in 1717, revised throughout her life, and posthumously published in 1763, offer a rich site for studying the way cultural dislocation enables the emergence of female subjectivities constructed collaboratively across cultural lines.1 Montagu describes her encounter with Turkish culture as a radically decentering experience that effected a productive loss and subsequent reconstitution of her subject position through social and discursive interactions with other women. Resisting the eighteenth-century tendency to Other women of empire in order to consolidate English women in a domestic sphere, Montagu's letters may be read as an ethnography of Turkish women's culture that does not represent culture as an order, an Other, or a fixed world of any sort but, instead, conveys the fluidity of a culture whose women seem remarkably able to accommodate a multiplicity of alterities into their social fabric.2 In an attempt to break down the "binarism[s]" that "could cause [colonial cultural studies] to atrophy," Sara Suleri locates the figure "of the colonizer within the precarious discourse of the immigrant" and argues that the concept of "transfer" would enable us to better appreciate and understand the subtleties of colonial encounters that continue to be reductively described through the binary of domination/subordination.3 Montagu's letters might be read much more fruitfully as representing what Suleri calls a "migrant moment of dislocation" rather than replicating the Orientalist paradigm of colonizing subject and objectified Other.4 Dislocation fosters a productive relativism which, for Montagu, becomes the requisite intellectual position from which she resists being wholly determined by her location and comes to value her responses to other contexts as a means, however contingent and circumscribed, of constituting her own subjectivity.
The apparent strength of the Ottoman Empire in 1717 is a historical fact that renders any schematic elucidation and critique of an alteritist model (figuring the West as imperial power and the East as disempowered) in Montagu's letters anachronistic.5 When Montagu went to Turkey, the West did not clearly dominate the economic and political conversation and, in fact, depended on successful diplomacy to maintain open trade with the Ottomans.6 While historical facts should give critics pause, an alteritist model of the colonial encounter associated with the work of Edward Said that, according to most commentators, replicates...