Event Details

In 1896, the Ottoman sultan decreed that Armenians alone could emigrate, on condition they expatriate permanently and sit for a photograph. Professor Zeynep Devrim Gürsel discovered these expatriation portraits in the Ottoman state archives in Istanbul. Portraits of Unbelonging follows the individuals pictured over a century, from the files that unmade them as Ottoman subjects to the lives and descendants they left behind. Written in conversation with these descendants, the book offers both a genealogy of the document-based security regimes governing citizenship today and an intimate history of belonging.