Armenian Political Prisoners' Subjectivity in the Late Ottoman Empire

By looking at the memoirs of several political prisoners, I intend to analyze how the political imprisonment of Armenians in the Late Ottoman Empire created different political subjectivities that entailed extraordinary dynamics for how political prisoner subjectivity is represented. The figure of the political prisoner has been dominated by groups of particular social backgrounds, namely intellectuals, activists, and revolutionaries. Political prisoner subjectivity has been founded on its distinction from ‘ordinary prisoners’ but, in the case of Ottoman Armenian political imprisonment, the diverse range of people being imprisoned because of their national identity creates a different setting that can challenge the accustomed figures and cultural representations of political prisoners across different contexts. My purpose is to see how these accustomed dynamics play out with the setting of Ottoman Armenian political prisoners in their reflections.