36 pages, paperback
14,8 x 21,0, 2025
This study examines the self-representations of Armenian child survivors during the Armenian genocide, while engaging with new historiography on children and youth. Armenian children survived under paradoxical circumstances: they were targets (and hence victims) of direct violence, sexual exploitation, and the erasure of identity, but they were also agents who resisted through escape, deception, and defiance. Their agency was neither limitless nor transformative, but primarily a means of endurance, shaped by age, gender, and social bonds. Relying on various works in the self-narrative and testimonial genres as primary sources, including oral histories, memoirs, and diaries written at different points in time in the twentieth century, I analyse how child survivors depicted themselves as heroes—rebellious misfits who resisted authority, protected the weak, retaliated against oppressors, and embarked on perilous journeys. These narratives highlight survival, play, friendship, and solidarity amid trauma. I argue that, though often used as evidence of Armenian victimhood, survivor testimonies also reveal a parallel narrative: one of agency, resilience, and self-determination, thus challenging traditional portrayals of genocide survivors solely as passive victims.
The Author
Nazan Maksudyan is a Senior Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin) in the ERC project “Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1914”, and a visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. She was a fellow in the program “Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe” (EUME) in 2009–2010 and an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) in 2010–2011 and in 2016–2018. From 2013 to 2016, she worked as a professor of history in Istanbul and received her habilitation degree in 2015. Her research is mainly focused on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, with special interest in children and youth, gender, sexuality, exile and migration, sound studies, and the history of sciences. She is the author of Türklüğü Ölçmek (Metis, 2005), Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse UP, 2014), and Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I (Syracuse UP, 2019). She is also an editorial board member of Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Journal of Women’s History, Journal of European Studies, and First World War Studies.
