Prof. Parla to speak at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Prof. Ayse Parla will be giving a talk at Harvard’s CMES to all faculty and grad students on Wednesday, January 25th at 4:30pm. The talk will be in person and via Zoom in case anyone is interested and available to attend!
Title: Hamlet After Genocide: Haunting, Justice, and Empirical Fabulation
DATE: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 2023, 4:30PM TO 6:00PM
LOCATION: CMES, ROOM 102, 38 KIRKLAND ST; AND ZOOM
More details can be found here: https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/…/hamlet-after-genocide…
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.
