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CMES and Friends of Hrant Dink are pleased to present
Ayşe Parla
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Boston University
This event will take place at CMES and on Zoom; register here to attend online: https://bit.ly/3QNem5Q.
Abstract: Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat, Ottoman minister and a key architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation and between personal revenge and legal justice, this talk examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir--which remained untranslated for 70 years-- to show the legal, moral and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother. My coinage of the term empirical fabulation is animated by Saidiya Hartman’s innovative call for “critical fabulation.” Following the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother, I explore the political and ethical potential of fabulation in recounting acts of genocidal violence which strain if not defy straightforward representation, especially in those instances when the existing rule of law does not rise to the demands for justice.
Ayşe Parla is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. She received her BA from Harvard and her Ph.D. from New York University. She taught at Sabancı University in Istanbul and was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first book, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2019), was awarded an honorable mention by the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology.
Co-sponsors: Friends of Hrant Dink, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Contact: Liz Flanagan