Freedom’s Surprise: Two Paths Through Slavery’s Archives

Silko’s Vévé and the Web of Differing Versions

“…My model for this article is David Kazanjian's "Freedom's Surprise: Two Paths through Slavery' s Archives." 22 At the center of my argument, as Kazanjian suggests, are the stories we hear and the languages available to tell them. There are many paths.…”

Hamlet after Genocide: The Haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and Empirical Fabulation

“…As the third-order interpreter of Tehlirian’s second-order rendition of his experiences, I remain wedded to calibrating the threshold of evidence. So does Tehlirian, I argue, treading the delicate line between the Hartmanian leap to critical fabulation and holding onto the concern with the “more traditional, social-historical questions of who did what, where, when, and why” (Kazanjian 2016: 135). If contemporary indigenous hyperrealist art forms “fake it with the truth,” (Biddle and Lea 2018), because this was seen as the most powerful way to expose the violence of settler colonialism, Tehlirian similarly calibrates how “artifice enables reality effects” 2006: 6) 25 .…”

“…The full text existed only in Eastern Armenian, with an original Cairo edition (Tʻēhlirean 1953) and a subsequent Yerevan edition (Tʻēhlirean 2006). 4 By reading the court proceedings in tandem with 2 It is important to reiterate the gradual shift in Hartman's own thinking in regard to what is within the realm of possibility: while her reading of the two Venuses in 2008 cautions about the extent to which she can reconstruct those figures obliterated by the archive, she argues for far more interpretive license in Wayward Lives in terms of what the historian may imagine, moving in the direction urged by Kazanjian (2016).…”

“…Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, as well as between personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir, which has remained in the shadows, to scrutinize these two texts for not only the empirical information they hold but also “for the ways they speculate upon ontological, epistemological, and political questions” (Kazanjian 2016: 140). There is already a rich body of writing on the Tehlirian trial by historians and genocide scholars, with a proliferation in the last five years in commemoration of the genocide’s centennial 1 .…”