Local Brothers, National Enemies: Representations of Religious Otherness in Post-Ottoman Epirus (Greece).

The paper presents a general overview of an ongoing research on representations of multi-religious Epirote society in local textual narratives. Aim of the paper is to explore the interplay between the Greek nationalistic script of anti-Muslim discourses and the local narratives of the Ottoman past. The focus is on the objectification of local memories in textual narratives and how this process has been affected by the diglossic relationships between oral and written Greek, which favoured a textual re-elaboration of local memories through the lens of dominant national narratives. It is argued that the analysis of `marginal texts' in `marginal contexts' can provide a useful ground to reflect on the complexities implied in the reshaping of the Ottoman past and the multi-religious character of Ottoman Balkan society, caught in between the imperatives of national narratives and the selective processes of local memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]