Bio: Houri Berberian

Houri Berberian is associate professor of History at California State University, Long Beach and the director of the Middle Eastern Studies minor program. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Armenian History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1993 and 1997, respectively. She is the author of several published and forthcoming articles, including the prize-winning "Armenian Women in Turn-of-the-Century Iran: Education and Activism,² in Iran and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2000). Her book, Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911: ³The Love for Freedom Has No Fatherland² (Westview Press) appeared in 2001. She is currently working on two projects: one on issues of Iranian-Armenian identity and memory and the other, a co-authored work with Sebouh Aslanian, tentatively titled ³The Cosmopolitans: A Commercial Biography of the Sheriman family of Julfa and Venice.²

Abstract

Melding Private Lives and Public Spaces: Iranian-Armenian Memoirs and National Discourse

This study explores the relationship between memory of individual, private lives and the re/construction and writing of history. Memoirs and autobiographies written in Armenian and by Armenian participants in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) and others began to appear soon after the revolution in 1913 and continued until the 1960s. These narratives challenge the dichotomy between private and public spheres as anecdotal experiences of individuals translate into a public discourse on nationhood. Drawing on memoirs and autobiographies themselves as well as theoretical works on memoirs and autobiographies, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which authors in writing their memories were cognizant of their own role as historical actors and as presenters of their experiences. Through the act of committing their memories to paper for a public audience, they and their readers perceived them to be worthy of recollection. They attempted to shape the memory of others while at the same time receiving group confirmation. Without that kind of reaffirmation from the larger group, individual memoirs would have withered away and not necessarily contributed to history, identity, or collective memory. In other words, here the self did not exist without the public audience. Therefore, as a genre, autobiographies and memoirs carry within them a claim to public space. As a form of political discourse, these narratives challenge us to interrogate the ways that these activists/authors created a public space in which narratives of individual and national creation coincided and overlapped, thus bringing into existence a new systematic form in which two seemingly dissimilar elements, private and public, meld into a powerful vehicle of political transformation.