Public lecture

New Directions in Western Armenian Studies

Centre for Western Armenian Studies

Registration Online event

6 déc. 2024 2:00 PM

ZOOM LECTURE

New York - United States

Images of the Male Migrant in the Armenian American Revolutionary Press, 1896-1914

Dr Bedros Torosian

Armenian revolutionary newspapers in the United States characterized transatlantic migration as the “Other Catastrophe” before the real major catastrophe of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Editors and activists were concerned about the departure of Armenian youth to new urban centers in New York City and Boston outside the native Armenian-inhabited Ottoman vilayets. They orchestrated a vehement anti-immigration campaign denouncing transatlantic travel as the Ottoman government enacted restrictionist policies regarding Armenian mobility, an existential threat to the empire's security. This presentation examines the racialized and gendered anxieties that propelled revolutionaries to demonize US-bound Armenian migration. It tracks down the contested images of the male migrant on the eve of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the looming unresolved Armenian Question.

Dr. Bedros Torosian is a University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis. He earned his PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine, in 2024. His research investigates the intersectionality of race, gender, nationalism, and migration in early-twentieth-century Ottoman diasporic communities in the United States. He is currently working on his book project, Whiteness Across Waters, that examines the various streams of colorblind Ottoman transatlantic racialization on the eve of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.

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