Ayşe Parla

“Peripheral Time: Memoir as Survival after the Armenian Genocide” combines biographical cultural history, literary criticism, historical anthropology, and ethnography to examine the art of living as Verabrogh (“the one who lives again”) in the post-genocidal landscape of Istanbul/Bolis. Through close readings of memoirs by four intellectuals and a fifth unfinished memoir, it explores how these five figures, who shared the predicament of having narrowly escaped he genocide, felt compelled to write within the loose rubric of the memoir, trying to continue to live in a city celebrated for its cosmopolitanism yet one steeped in the denial of their status as survivors. I situate each text (and, in one case, its absence) within the context of its production, (mis)representations, and reception over time, extending to the present day. How does one continue to survive in the land of genocide when genocide is officially denied and when denial is internalized by the overwhelming majority of the society?How does one navigate the everyday tension between what is violently present and hauntingly absent? What does it mean to live in non-contemporaneous time? “Peripheral Time” is also a meditation on method and a plea for interdisciplinary methodologies that bridge social sciences and the humanities when the archive of “survival writing” can in some ways only exist through the absences and silences upon which it relies. How does an ethnographic reading of memoirs enhance our understanding of the genre of memoir? Conversely, how does the memoir complicate the criteria for verisimilitude within life history methods and the use of the vignette as a staple of ethnographic monographs? I suggest that a cross- disciplinary approach to reading memoirs could further illuminate the insufficiently examined historicity of ethnography itself. I develop two concepts throughout the book: “empirical fabulation” reconsiders the relationship between truth and reality in literature and in ethnography; and “peripheral time” seeks to capture the experience of living alongside and within hegemonic temporality.