From Apology to Apologist: Halide Edib Adıvar in the Face of Armenian Massacres

Guest Speaker: Lerna Ekmekçioğlu (History, MIT)

Co-sponsored by the Ottoman History Workshop and Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies

RSVP for paper.

Please join us for our next meeting of the Ottoman History Workshop co-sponsored with the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies on September 6th at 12 pm. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu of MIT will join us to workshop her paper “From Apology to Apologist: Halide Edib Adıvar in the Face of Armenian Massacres.” As always, please RSVP for the paper.

Bio: Lerna Ekmekçioğlu is associate professor of history and director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at MIT. She completed her BA in sociology from Boğazici University, and her PhD in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies at New York University. In addition to her work in Armenian and Turkish, she has published the 2016 monograph Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, which won the Der Mugrdechian Society for Armenian Studies Outstanding Book Award. Her articles have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Études arméniennes contemporaines, among many other venues.

Abstract: The paper is about the Turkish feminist nationalist writer and politician Halide Edib (Adıvar, 1884-1964) and her evolving perspective on Ottoman Armenians, especially in light of Armenian responses. The article covers the 1908-1930 period, from the Young Turk revolution of 1908, which initiated her public life, to the 1930 publication of her history book by Yale University Press. During this period, Edib was transformed from a humanist Ottomanist intellectual feeling remorse for her fellow Ottoman Armenian compatriots’ suffering to a genocide apologist. I develop the argument that when Halide Edib did not feel a threat to herself and her “nation” as the dominant group in the Ottoman/Turkish polity, she could feel and express compassion, even guilt. But when she felt that the objects of her compassion “transgressed” – such as by asking for reparations, reforms, territory, and seeking retributive justice – they became “perpetrators.” In other words, for her, Armenians ceased to be “victims” and, therefore, deserving of compassion when they did something to ease their victimization. When Armenians asked to be on par with Turks (such as by having statehood) Edib retrospectively blamed them for what they had incurred on themselves during WWI, even when it was “a campaign of tehcir ve imhâ” (deportation and annihilation) as she had herself put it in November 1918.

Registration Instructions

Lunch will be provided- please specify any dietary restrictions. If you have registered less than four days before the event, please contact Cassie Kirchmeier (cassandra.kirchmeier@vanderbilt.edu) for the pre-circulated reading.