Of Dark Pasts and Pipe Dreams: The Turkish University

Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna

doi:10.53979/yillik.2021.12

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…3 While presenting from this piece at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in November of 2021, I was asked whether it is apt to draw an analogy between the erasures of the archives of slavery in the United States and the erasures of the archives of the Armenian Genocide. Lerna Ekmekcioglu (2021) has eloquently articulated the relevance of a comparative framework between the epistemic violence of trivializing the continuing violence of slavery in the American present and the systematic denial of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, as well as its continued distortions and erasures in the predominant scholarship in Turkish Studies. 4 At the time of writing, the memoir remained untranslated since its first publication in Cairo in Eastern Armenian in 1953.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Parla

2023

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, and personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir, to show the legal, moral, and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother. I move beyond the usual designations of Tehlirian as mere political assassin or self-evident moral witness and consider him instead as an “empirical fabulist.” My coinage of the term empirical fabulation is animated by Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) call for “critical fabulation,” and my reading of Tehlirian as an empirical fabulist recognizes him as a genocide survivor who aspired for collective justice, a son haunted by his mother’s ghost, and a historical actor who gave a fabricated testimony that was nonetheless based on the empirical facts of genocide. This paper is an invitation to explore the political and ethical potential, and perhaps even the necessity, of fabulation in recounting acts of genocidal violence that strain or defy straightforward representation, especially in cases when the existing rule of law does not rise to the demands for justice.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Parla

2023

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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“…Today, the problems that Christians (and Jews) have been facing in Turkey are usually discussed and studied under the heading of 'minority issues'. It is accepted that these groups of different ethnic, religious and cultural identities, being numerically in the minority, encounter a series of issues in connection with the society of the majority (Ekmekcioglu, 2016(Ekmekcioglu, , 2021. This approach is quite problematic.…”

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confidence: 99%

1923 and the legacies of genocide

Kurt

2024

History Compass

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This article discusses the founding of the Republic and the legacy of the Armenian genocide of 1915 in the subsequent decades by scrutinizing two pivotal facets. The first one revolves around the accumulation of capital by the Turkish state through the sequestration of Armenian properties, and the second one is the appointment of mid‐level Ottoman bureaucrats of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as new civilian bureaucrats of the Republican regime without accountability for their involvement in the Armenian genocide during wartime. Thus, the article argues that perpetrators of this genocide under the CUP regime ascended to the upper echelons of the bureaucracy during the Republican era.

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Unseeing the Past

Smith¹

2022

Current Anthropology

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Of Dark Pasts and Pipe Dreams: The Turkish University

Abstract: YILLIK is a peer-reviewed annual journal, published simultaneously in print and online (via Dergipark).

Cited by 7 publications

References 1 publication

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

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

1923 and the legacies of genocide

Unseeing the Past

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