A self-portrait of the Armenian artist as Homo Sacer "The Biopolitical limits of Hagop Mintzuri’s life writing"

Abstract

In 1916, when James Joyce published his semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man while leading a self-induced exilic life in Europe, Hagop Demirjian, an Ottoman-Armenian from eastern Anatolia, was struggling to reorganize his own life after becoming a hostage in Istanbul in the immediate after- math of the Armenian Genocide in 1915. As apart of a long and violent process of Turkish nation-building, the systematic ethnic cleansing of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was the last stage of the transformation and homogenization of the imperial state into a Turkish nation-state in 1923.¹ Although estimates suggest that more than one million Armenians living in the provinces were either violently killed or deported to the farthest corners of the empire (a prolonged form of extermination deployed mostly against women and children who were subjected to starvation and rape), the imperial seat was partly excused and excluded from the mass killings by the Young Turk-led Ottoman government.² That year changed Demirjians life irrevocably, as he lost everything he owned: his close and distant family, his village, his simple rural life.