Hamlet after Genocide: The Haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and Empirical Fabulation
Parla, Ayşe · 2023
Revisits Tehlirian's 1921 Berlin acquittal in light of Tehlirian's own 1953 memoir, in which he acknowledged that elements of his courtroom account departed from fact. Parla focuses on the legal, moral and epistemological work performed by the ghost of Tehlirian's mother, who appeared in his testimony, and on the trial's place in the origins of genocide as a legal category. Building on Saidiya Hartman's 'critical fabulation,' she develops the concept of 'empirical fabulation' to think about the ethical potential of fabulation in recounting genocidal violence that resists straightforward representation, particularly where existing law fails to meet demands for justice.
Read the publication ↗Citation
Parla, Ayşe 2023. Hamlet after Genocide: The Haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and Empirical Fabulation. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 65, No. 2, pp. 446–470 (Cambridge University Press).
What this offers a reader
Handle with care and read closely: it argues the courtroom story was not literally true, and asks what truth it told anyway.
Cambridge UP; a sophisticated argument about testimony, law and moral truth, not a debunking.
It says the trial testimony was shaped. It also says that shaping was how justice got said at all.
The Tehlirian trial, and the difference between what is factual and what is true.
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