FROM KIN TO KIND: ARMENIAN RACIALIZATION AND THE MEDIATION OF THE “HUMAN” IN THE LATE-TO-POST OTTOMAN EMPIRE

“From Kin to Kind: Armenian Racialization and the Mediation of the ‘Human’ in the Late-to-Post Ottoman Empire” traces the interspecies dynamics of racialization in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish republic through the perspective of one of the empire’s ethnominority communities: Armenians. It asks who was considered a proper “human” and who an “animal” on the eve of empire’s collapse, arguing that racialization was predicated on a developing human/nonhuman divide crucial to the spatial reorganization of borders and bodies in this imperial transition. Framed as a movement “from kin to kind,” the project explores how interspecies kinships were replaced by genus-based kinds and how these forces have imagined, normatively reproduced, and queerly contested the borders of lands and bodies on the eve of the Turkish republic and into the present. Genealogical in method and grounded in close reading, “From Kin to Kind” situates Armenian racialization within a global history of the human-animal boundary under the nation-state. Across four chapters, it examines the 1909 Hayırsızada dog massacre carried out by the newly secular ruling party; European colonial-inspired eugenics texts produced by Armenian feminists during the genocide and erasure of their communities; contemporary translations of those texts circulating in diasporic contexts of Western whiteness grammars; and the messy entanglements among ethnoracialized and nonhuman subjects on the women’s block of Constantinople’s central prison. By analyzing this historical archive and its narrative fissures alongside contemporary cultural productions—including film, literature, social media, and translations—it shows that early twentieth-century distinctions between human and animal continue to inform racial, sexual, and gendered patrolling across the Armenian diaspora and Turkey today. Drawing on multimedia and autotheoretical translation practices, it argues that while late Ottoman human and other-than-human subjects’ everyday lives were biopolitically regulated, their continued intimacies—as seen through multimedia translations—persistently resist enforcement. Bringing literary, media, critical race, queer, feminist, and translation studies into conversation with Armenian, Ottoman, and Turkish studies, this research advances posthumanism and critical race studies and contributes to emerging conversations across these fields.