ASP Lecture | 'Grasping the Constellations': On the (Im)possibility of Writing Armenian History

How do we write stories of survivors? How do people continue to live as citizens of a state that once sought their annihilation? While there is a plethora of work on the Armenian genocide and subsequently the diaspora, there is a dearth in the literature on the Armenian citizens of Turkey, especially those in Anatolia. This lecture examines the difficulties and possibilities of writing the Armenian past of genocide survivors in Anatolia when people and their stories are fragmented, displaced, and left no archives. The lecture will present a reading of the recent oral accounts of Armenians in Turkey in the light of Walter Benjamin’s concept of history with the aim of situating these works as possible sources of historiography, and exploring critical methods for writing undocumented pasts.