Memoirs and other forms of personal testimony are essential sources for accessing late Ottoman Armenian history. These documents and recordings help us see a fuller picture of the past that includes experiences hidden by more traditional archival materials. In the Ottoman Armenian context, memoirs and personal testimony also help us think about the subtle nature of subjecthood -- that is, of being a subject, as opposed to a citizen, of an empire; they allow us to ask and analyze how (former) Ottoman subjects themselves expressed their relationship to the state, to their community, and to others.

Of course, using personal testimony as an historical source raises its own questions. How do we grapple with subjectivity and nostalgia? How reliable is memory? How do we account for personal agendas? This panel thus proposes to tackle two separate but related lines of inquiry. The first: what can the first-person accounts of an Armenian villager, Armenian political prisoners, an Armenian shoemaker, and provincial Armenian petitioners tell us about, respectively, Armenian-Kurdish relations, political prisoner subjectivity, and the role of hierarchy and power dynamics in Ottoman imperial subjecthood? Second: How does the fact of the "memoir" or the “petition” inform the conclusions we draw? How do we account for our protagonists' memories, subjectivities, and agendas? And, equally important, how can we think about the imperial nostalgia of historians themselves? Here, we will engage specifically with the field of oral history and its attention to “intersubjectivity” to consider how both the “interviewer” (the historian) and the historical narrator have identities and experiences that inform their statements, questions, and interpretations. We will also incorporate lessons from memory studies to ask how to identify nostalgia in both our sources and our historical practice, and, in turn, discuss what to do about it once we see it.

In tackling these issues, this panel will appeal to historians of Ottoman, Armenian, and Middle East history, as well as any historian interested in questions of theory and craft, especially as they relate to using first-person materials.