Abstracts

Keynote: Sebouh Aslanian, Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, UCLA
Armeno-Turkish as a heterographic literary field: Complicating Ottoman Convivencia 

This keynote presentation examines the complex cultural dynamics underlying Armeno-Turkish literary production in the Ottoman Empire through the analytical framework of convivencia versus conveniencia. Taking as its point of departure the "lachrymose" interpretative tradition exemplified by recent scholarship, this talk interrogates prevailing narratives of Armeno-Turkish cultural identity and literary hybridization. The presentation addresses a fundamental interpretative divide in Ottoman-Armenian studies. One scholarly tradition, influenced by the "lachrymose" conception of Armeno-Turkish historiography, characterizes Armeno-Turkish identity as the product of systematic and continuous oppression, with Christian populations living under the perpetual threat of annihilation—that is, a cultural formation born of repression rather than organic development. Conversely, another interpretative school posits Armeno-Turkish literary culture as evidence of an "inter-faith utopia," drawing parallels to medieval Iberian convivencia and citing the richness of composite cultural production as "proof" of harmonious coexistence among diverse religious communities. This presentation proposes a third analytical framework that acknowledges cultural hybridization while rejecting both the pessimistic lachrymosity and the idealized convivencia model. Rather than reflecting either systematic persecution or frictionless cultural exchange, Armeno-Turkish literary tradition emerges from this analysis as the product of a hierarchical imperial system organized around pragmatic accommodation—what Brian A. Catlos, Baki Tezcan, and others have termed the "principle of convenience" or conveniencia. This framework allows for a more nuanced understanding of how eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ottoman Armenians and other "millet" communities navigated cultural production within the constraints and opportunities of imperial Constantinople's stratified social order.