Writing Against the Law: Ottoman-Armenian Print Culture

Censorship is the cornerstone of all autocracies. The multiethnic and multireligious Ottoman Empire was no exception. As 19th century ideas of democratic governance and civic equality took hold in the states multilingual press and publications, the ruling elites felt threatened by public scrutiny. They responded by imposing increasingly harsher regulations to shield themselves from open criticism and dissent. Presses could be shut down, and publishers, editors, and writers could receive hefty fines or even prison sentences for statements deemed offensive to the state. While these pressures silenced some segments of society, many others found ways to articulate grievances or propagate democratic values without inviting the states hostility. The more stringent these regulations became, the more inventively the agents of print culture responded in their use of language, meaning, and context to resist oppressive policies. In so doing, they ensured the social and moral continuity of egalitarian principles in public consciousness. Their efforts and achievements have unfortunately been overlooked by histories of this period, mainly because their tactics are difficult to detect in superficial readings without the requisite sensitivity to deeper contexts. This project strives to correct that oversight by revealing the untold story of how a broad spectrum of cultural actors - from editors and writers to translators and performers - employed literary narratives to build social cohesion and resist tyranny. As a case study, this project homes in on the work of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire - a segment of society that was condemned not only to genocidal elimination, but whose history has also been largely expunged or minimized in official histories of the Turkish state. Being Christians under Islamic rule, this population was treated as second-class subjects and hence, closely monitored and scrutinized. This project will examine how Armenians responded to such measures from the advent of print regulation (1857) until the onset of the First World War, by enquiring: How did they employ language, imagination, and rhetorical techniques towards political subversion? How did their social and political networks determine the types of narratives they produced? And how did they cultivate and disseminate such resistance beyond writing? A broad spectrum of sources held in various countries - such as Armenia, Turkey, and Austria - will be closely analyzed in order to provide a full response to these queries. The findings are expected to uncover and present previously unknown or unacknowledged works; to shed light on undetected literary processes; and to present the indispensable roles of differing parties, be they civil society leaders, imperial functionaries, or the censors themselves.