Tuesday, May 7, 2024
12:00-1:00 p.m.
McKinney Conference Room (353), Watson Institute, 111 Thayer
About the Event
In 1896 Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II issued a decree that allowed Ottoman Armenians - and only Ottoman Armenians - to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. While these photographs look like family portraits and were often produced by professional Armenian studio photographers, they are binding legal documents of exclusion. These photographic subjects were no longer Ottoman subjects. As emigrants left on steamships from ports on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, their likenesses entered police files in the empire’s capital, Constantinople where I was to encounter them more than a century later in the Ottoman state archives. Portraits of Unbelonging is a history of mass migration told on an intimate scale that interrogates nationality and subjecthood and the rise of the document-based global security regimes that govern citizenship and mobility today. Drawing from this research, in this talk Prof. Gürsel will trace the story of one family to highlight the gap between the law as it is pronounced by a sovereign and as it is experienced by individuals, families and communities.
Ottoman History Podcast with Zeynep Gürsel