Introducing the “Armenian Ottoman History” Issue of JOTSA

Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 231–237 Copyright © 2017 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.4.2.01 Introducing the “Armenian Ottoman History” Issue of JOTSA Lerna Ekmekcioglu This special “Armenian Ottoman History” issue of JOTSA heralds—and demonstrates—that a process that had begun about two decades ago has come to near fruition in the present. Two neighboring fields, Ottoman/Turkish Studies and Armenian Studies, had long remained aloof, if not in enmity. In the early 2000s historical and political processes led them to a slow peace followed by an at first timid but an increasingly productive and bold merging. In order to bring to light how the broader changes in the scholarship are being reflected in the younger generation’s work, we consciously invited six graduate students and one recent PhD to contribute to this volume. The seven articles, all brilliantly integrating Armenians into the history of the Ottoman Empire and the empire (the state and its people) into the study of its Armenians, are proof that we are better off together than apart. The seasoned Ottomanist and the expert of Turkish and/or Armenian history have reason to look forward to the future version of their respective fields in which the splitting borders are blurred if not dismantled, research questions complicated, sources expanded. It is not a coincidence that it is in 2015 that Kent Schull, the editor of JOTSA, conceived the initial idea of doing a special issue on Armenians as Ottomans. That year marked the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, the event that is the main cause for the divergent and frequently antagonistic tracks in which Ottoman/Turkish and Armenian historiographies have historically evolved. It is not the job of this short introduction to analyze the reasons why a major national catastrophe and its naming became such a politically charged issue dividing not only two peoples but whole scholarships. This topic has been adequately discussed in the pages of JOTSA before.1 My emphasis here is on the ways in which Ottoman and Turkish Studies responded to the centennial 1. Howard Eissenstat, “Children of Özal: The New Face of Turkish Studies,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 23–35; David Gutman, “Ottoman Historiography and the End of the Genocide Taboo: Writing the Armenian Genocide into Late 232 Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4.2 and how it all signaled the sea changes that the field has been undergoing for quite some time. Not only in Europe and North America but also inside Turkey itself workshops were organized, talk series launched, books published, and roundtables convened, all with an open-minded, politically discharged perspective that moved beyond the now passé “questioning” of the event’s name (was it a genocide or not?) but instead focused on analyzing the event as well as the long history of Armenian and non-Armenian co-existence in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey.2 One such effort towards an honest “rapprochement” between the two fields was a collaboration between OTSA and the Society for Armenian Studies (SAS) for the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association . Even though OTSA and SAS had previously co-sponsored panels, the roundtable that the two societies supported for the 2016 meeting in Boston was different from its predecessors, because it did not censor any “dark pasts” nor did it avoid questioning the existential biases and vulnerabilities of each field. Titled “Knowledge Production, Exclusion, Inclusion: The Repositioning of Armenians in Ottoman and Turkish Historiography” and organized by this author as the OTSA representative and Bedross Der Matossian as the SAS representative, the roundtable brought together six scholars as well as a large and eagerly participating audience in which questions pertaining to the intersections , overlaps, and entangled routes of Ottoman, Turkish, and Armenian historiographies were productively discussed. Most importantly, we brainstormed about possible avenues of strengthening the already ongoing dialogue amongst the scholars and their work. This special issue is an attempt towards that end, to suggest one mode of working together effectively. Even though one can still hear the complaints...