"Hope, Vengeance and Ghosts"

Muslim Studies Teatime Talk "Hope, Vengeance and Ghosts" with Ayse Parla, Assistant Professor, Anthropology Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Reading the archive “speculatively” (Kazanjian 2016), I reconsider the distinctions between the medical discourse of insanity and the legal discourse of intentionality, between revenge and justice, and between truth and fabulation. Specifically, I am working with the court transcripts of the 1921 trial and Tehlirian’s untranslated 1953 memoir to understand the legal, moral and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) call for “critical fabulation, ” I follow Tehlirian’s mother’s ghost as the spectral figure that hovers over both Tehlirian and the critic in the path towards a greater understanding of truth, revenge and retribution when the collective experience of violence exceeds the limits of the genre of personal testimony and when justice is not served within normative legal frameworks.