Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #12

The Aghed and its Displacement Paths as Collecting Practices:

From Marzovan to Fresno^[1]

by Marianna Hovhannisyan

January 10, 2023

Figure 1. Construction progress of the Library-Museum, Anatolia College, Marsovan, Ottoman Empire, 1912. The banners in the image represent the fundraising call for finishing the building. © United Church of Christ (UCC), American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), SALT Research.

The power of the archive to constitute a history and identity of a people speaks to me with urgency, given my work as an Eastern Armenian woman conducting archival research and curatorial projects through a politics of classification dealing with the trans-imperial fragmentations of Armenian historiography and arts. My work critically engages with Eastern and Western Armenian genealogies as modern examples subjected to epistemic violence through forced displacement, cultural appropriations, and archival silences. It is in terms of this epistemic violence that I intentionally resituate the Armenian subject and its cultural production as indigenous, subaltern, diasporic, and national—all concepts which always require a careful analysis. Specifically, I address archival metadata as a form through which things are conserved, rendered findable, but also hidden or given new meaning, regional provenances, linguistic frames, and labels. I search for Armenian traces in transnational archives, emphasizing the politics of classification as a means that has constituted ruin (and continues to constitute ruin), but also as a strategy through which to imagine new historiographies, particularly in alliance with Black studies and Indigenous studies scholars and curators who likewise interrogate knowledge systems, their structural affordances, and traps.^[2]

This methodology is critical for recognizing how historically fragmented Eastern and Western Armenians were as modern trans-imperial subjects^[3] in their ancestral lands in West Asia under the Persian Empire (1502–1828), the Russian Empire (1828–1917), and the Ottoman Empire (1453–1922).^[4] As such, Armenian contemporary historiography emerges with different destinies, ruptures, languages, and cultures, and thus archival traces as well. The formation of the diaspora is predominantly due to the Armenian Genocide committed in the Ottoman Empire primarily against Western Armenians.^[5] Today, what can be considered as diasporic archives and collections of the survivors and their generations include Armenian community practices, grassroots or institutional initiatives, and what gets preserved in displacement.^[6] Meanwhile, the official repositories in Turkey are either censored, destroyed, misattributed, or uncatalogued within a denialism context of the crime.

Eastern Armenians who were under the Persian and later Russian Empire had undergone Sovietization in the 1920s. Since 1991, what remains from these territories forms the Republic of Armenia and the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh (RA), whose status has changed after the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020.^[7] The Republic of Artsakh is a breakaway state in the South Caucasus populated by Armenians, yet internationally unacknowledged as such and instead recognized as part of Azerbaijan. In September 2020, during the global pandemic, Azerbaijan launched a war against indigenous Armenians in Artsakh. Since then, the RA lost control over the major parts of the territories to Azerbaijan. Under the terms of a Russian brokered “protection,” Armenians can still live in a few regions, but only under Russian “peacekeepers.”^[8] This condition “suddenly” left Armenian museums, archival institutes, multiple ancient, medieval, and prehistorical monuments, archeological sites, churches, cemeteries, and cross-stones under Azerbaijan’s control. To this date, UNESCO has been unsuccessful in gaining access to these; meanwhile, using satellite and social media documentation, NGOs have demonstrated that Azeri authorities and military are destroying and defacing Armenian cultural heritage, often to falsely attribute it as “Caucasian Albanian.”^[9]

Figure 2. Destruction of the Armenian cemetery in 2021 by the Azeri authorities, in the village of Sghnakh in the Nagorno-Karabakh / the Republic of Artsakh. Image courtesy: Ian Lindsay, Adam T. Smith, and Lori Khatchadourian, Caucasus Heritage Watch Monitoring Report 2 (Ithaca: Caucasus Heritage Watch, 2021).

The outcome of these recent and historical wars are the afterlives of displaced and newly classified people and things, rendering diasporic returns impossible while making systematic the destruction of Armenian culture in West Asia, including archival fragmentations and redistribution. In short, my work is guided through a new generational composite of ongoing intergenerational trauma, with loss of land and rights but specifically a lost episteme motivating me to theorize and historicize my direct engagement with archives, collections, and metadata through postcolonial and decolonial theories.^[10]

Informed by such complexities, this essay focuses on the concept of “empty fields,” conceived in relation to the gaps and silences in archives that bear witness to colonial destruction—the 1915 Armenian Genocide. This concept begins with metadata fields in archives and collections which take the form of titles, dates, names of creators, geographies, etc. These fields may appear blank due to absented knowledge and erasures enacted by genocidal policies and colonial “pasts.” However, I propose these can also serve as the markers of lost ontologies and epistemologies—discursive, disciplinary, and geographic. While the metadata-level archival gaps may actually be the recording of traces of epistemic violence and dispossession from the lands, they should be considered as part of strategies for undoing the imperial damages.^[11]

My curatorial exhibition project, Empty Fields (2016), at SALT Cultural Center in Istanbul, explored this notion.^[12] The project was a decolonial imaginary through the dialogues I put in motion: with a cultural institution in Istanbul focusing on the overlap between archives and arts; with a contemporary artist, Fareed Armaly, to conceptualize and materialize empty fields in terms of exhibition-making; and with the Armenian, Greek, Kurdish, and Turkish communities.^[13] The exhibition exposes the archival instabilities evident at the level of empty data fields serving as markers of irretrievable histories, which now remain as the only contemporary narratives to follow. In 2019, I further explored direct connections between the exhibition’s main content, the focus on Marzovan in the Ottoman Empire, with Fresno, California, where the descendants of Genocide survivors now live. By looking there for the Armenian diasporic repositories, I aim to show a form of narrative methodology following the gaps in archives created by the violent ruptures, in order to expose the broken links between historical erasures and diasporic becomings, but also to recognize new imaginaries in dialogue with other displaced identities and collecting practices.

Empty Fields as Archival Missing Data Fields

The exhibition project Empty Fields,^[14] a commission I received from SALT, grew out of my original research conducted while on a Hrant Dink Foundation Fellowship at the American Board Archives (ABA) in Turkey.^[15] This archives is dedicated to the Protestant missionary work of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in the Ottoman Empire and later in Turkey. The American Research Institute in Istanbul, the archives owner, and SALT have been cataloguing and digitizing materials since 2014. American missionaries of the era collaborated with Christian communities, specifically with Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, thus, this repository contains social, administrative, and cultural materials referring to the pre- and post-Genocide.

My fellowship began with the cataloguing of untranslated Western Armenian records and photographs in the ABA. It is important to highlight what my translation skills in Western Armenian represent. Spoken by Armenians under the Ottoman Empire and currently in the diaspora, surviving handwritten records in this language impose difficulties of translation as its contemporary preservation depends on usage, yet the world which it inhabited no longer exists. This language factor, therefore, further drew my research to the period in which the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Republic of Turkey was formed, whereby certain archival absences within untranslated primary sources bear the traces of the 1915 Genocide. While working on these materials, I encountered the occurrence of empty data fields that refer to the records in Western Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, Greek, and Greco-Turkish languages formerly used in the Ottoman Empire.^[16] My further research on these materials began to outline a particular shared relation between markers that would go on to exemplify the tangible scale of destruction by the catastrophic event of 1915 in the form of another archival inventory.

Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolia College

Following the empty data fields in the ABA, I came across to the Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolia College (1917–1918). It represents the inventory of a lost, century-old, natural science museum collection of the mission-led Museum of Anatolia College in Marzovan, Ottoman Empire (approximately 1890s to 1930s).^[17] My further research revealed it was curated by Armenian-German scientist and Genocide survivor Professor Johannes “John” Jacob Manissadjian (1862–1942).^[18] The Anatolia College was one of the successful models where Armenian, Greek, and American staff and students worked together to form new disciplines as pedagogies.^[19] In this context, Manissadjian’s envisioned museum^[20] was informed by his extensive student-oriented fieldwork expeditions in the Anatolian landscape as he carried out scientific studies in biology, geography, geology, and archeology.^[21] By 1915, the museum registered more than 7,000 specimens from the Jurassic to the contemporary world, from local areas and through international exchanges.

Figure 3. “Case G: Eggs, Insects, Minerals, etc.,” original pages, Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolia College by Prof. Manissadjian, 1917-1918. © United Church of Christ (UCC), American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), SALT Research.

After surviving the Genocide, Manissadjian surreptitiously returned in 1917 to then-militarized Marzovan. His aim was to create a single, detailed, handwritten inventory of this museum, which he completed by 1918 before permanently leaving the Ottoman Empire. This catalogue represents Manissadjian’s last curatorial act becoming his first archival act. Over the decade ahead, the museum collection was dispersed without record; his corresponding catalogue ended up in a nondescript inventory box within the ABA, whose many unrelated objects have been minimally tagged, awaiting missing information. Through my discovery, a century later in the ABA, the Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolia College with its lost world reveals the violent nature of the empty fields within as destruction of Armenian epistemology and ontology.^[22] In the final stages of the research, I could uncover a few physical remainders of the collection, labels, and display cases throughout Turkey, lacking provenances—as well, some plants related to the museum were tracked down in international natural science databases.

Empty Fields as Exhibition

Several factors inform the conversion from research into exhibition. My commission from SALT to propose a curatorial project brought with it a set of legitimation processes. SALT is a contemporary cultural institution, an entity in Turkey, and an infrastructure housing the physical archive and dealing with its cataloguing. A more salient point, there is the archive itself (i.e., the way it became a repository only in 2010 after the closure of what had been the ABCFM in Turkey).

With its curatorial narrative, Empty Fields explored the possibilities of the institutional frame of exhibition-making in a geopolitical context of Turkey. Its concept recognizes Manissadjian’s 1917 Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolia College as an act of inscription, produced among the ruins and violence. He alphabetically ordered display cases, tables, stands, and drawers, and meticulously registered every single exponent to create a unity of taxonomic orders.^[23] While Manissadjian and his colleagues were collecting, identifying, and preserving the natural strata of Anatolia, the same Armenian and Greek communities (and the college itself) became historical layers—ones that are now made absent.^[24] Through its contested geopolitical determinations, Manissadjian’s catalogue attains the status of an unattended artifact, lacking its historical and institutional references. Yet, through the exhibition, it generates a contemporary critical space joined with issues pertaining to museological and archival apparatuses.

Figure 4. Installation view of the Empty Fields, SALT Galata, Istanbul, 2016. “The Field is the World,” a timeline by Brian Johnson on the ABCFM’s work in the Ottoman Empire and, later, in Turkey. Izmir became the American Board’s regional headquarters, the site of its first schools and printing establishment. Top: View of the town and bay of Smyrna by Raffael Corsini, 1829. © 2006 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photo: Mark Sexton and Jeffrey R. Dykes. Empty Fields, SALT Galata, Istanbul, 2016. Photographer: Mustafa Hazneci. Image rights: Marianna Hovhannisyan/SALT.

Figure 5. Installation view of the Empty Fields, SALT Galata, Istanbul, 2016. The juncture leading to the section titled “Narrating the Museological Space of Empty Fields,” which begins with “A Plant Hunter for the International Field” presenting Tulipa sprengeri (Sprenger’s tulip), Amasya, Ottoman Empire. Photographer: Mustafa Hazneci. Image rights: Marianna Hovhannisyan/SALT.

Empty Fields proposed that the gaps as violent ruptures exposed by the ABA archives, at the level of the database, present irretrievable histories that might be manifested as structural narratives. As this project was taking place within an institution in Istanbul, I was interested in the ways in which archival impossibilities could generate convergences between Armenian lost epistemologies and museo-archival and contemporary arts frameworks. In order to activate this approach, I invited the contemporary artist Fareed Armaly to create and establish the conceptual framework of the exhibition design. Armaly’s artistic practice works with a research-driven methodology that “draws guidelines out from selected roles and fields of inquiry and sets them into new correspondences ‘coercing constellations’”^[25] and with exhibitions that “emerge as an aggregate identity comprised of different ‘scripts’ at work.”^[26] In Empty Fields, our two roles formed an exhibition-making dialogue in which the museo-archival implications of the lost Museum of Anatolia College emerged tangibly within the existing cultural institution, SALT, as a discursive space. Rare archival materials, specimens, and new video testimonies assembled in a curatorial narrative chart a contemporary museological space. Through this perspective, another archival repository emerges: Manissadjian’s 1917 Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolia College.

Figure 6. Installation view of the Empty Fields, SALT Galata, Istanbul, 2016. “Narrating the Museological Space of Empty Fields” section. A complete duplicate set of the handwritten pages of the Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolia College by Prof. Manissadjian, 1917-1918, is now itself the object on display. The decorative frame motif from the original museum label is used by Fareed Armaly as an element to create the design system for this section. Photographer: Mustafa Hazneci. Image rights: Marianna Hovhannisyan/SALT.

The exhibition research paths form a system through which to showcase the specific impacts of erasures and blankness inherent to the title Empty Fields. The SALT exhibition space is structured as a circuit comprised of different notions of fields: the historical American mission view—“the world is the field”—plus SALT’s archiving metadata fields, pedagogical fieldwork at Anatolia College, lost landscape, and disciplinary fields of study developed as part of the Armenian, Greek, and missionary collaboration at the college. Passages through these fields allow contemporary meanings—of the absence that structures each of them—to materialize. The circuit arrives at an ontological and epistemological cul-de-sac, within which the space of Manissadjian’s museum is established. It renders a repressive absence, layering bio- with necro-, ornament and patterns, original and synthetic artifacts and specimens. Specifically, the outlines of this space generated by Armaly through three elements illuminate the historical, cultural, and material implications of the absented museum and empty fields. Manissadjian’s actual catalogue is now presented as an artifact, set alongside two traces of his scientific and curatorial work in order to articulate loss and displacement: one is a graphic ornamental plant motif from a surviving museum display card found during my research in Turkey; the other, a rare Tulipa sprengeri (Sprenger’s tulip) from Amasya, which is now extinct in the Anatolian wild, but thrives in cultivation in part due to Manissadjian’s distribution of such bulbs before 1915.^[27] Situated within is a complete set of the duplicates of handwritten pages from Manissadjian’s catalogue, now themselves the object on display. These follow the original order and scale of their showcases, standing in for the missing objects. Their form of representation calls attention to Manissadjian’s act of inscription in 1917 as the threshold between the disaster and witnessing.

Aftermaths^[28]

The spatial discourse of the exhibition included wall texts, an exhibition guide with all research materials, and thematic panels, all planned to come together with a final publication.^[29] This 200-page publication, which I edited,^[30] looked beyond “archives and history” to engage with contemporary voices around the politics of loss and displacement, with commissions to scholars from Armenia, the Armenian diaspora, and descendants of Marzovan survivors in dialogue with Kurdish, Turkish, and Western thinkers.^[31] It had been readied for publishing yet was canceled by SALT in 2018. This speaks to the moment, whereby the temporal opening in Turkey for critical dialogues had become impossible as the state would align with an authoritarian (Erdogan’s) regime, repressing academic, artistic, and legal freedoms, including the Kurdish people’s resistance. Yet, the implication of the “soft” cancellation signaled to me that what remains is a constant repressive impossibility for Armenian agencies, specifically in the context of the denialism that causes the official legal ban on naming the Genocide and the ramifications it implies. In 2016, during the exhibition in Istanbul, I was not allowed to directly use the word “genocide” in my curatorial texts. Therefore, the texts oscillated between a cautious politics, “Great Catastrophe,” and aghed, meaning “the catastrophe” in Armenian, which stands for the unspeakable, the word named by the immediate survivors of 1915 to utter the unnamable. Between 2018 and 2020, different segments of my exhibition research have been appropriated by Turkey-based scholars to frame Manissadjian as merely an Ottoman scientist, underplaying his Armenian identity and the fact that the catalogue exists today only because he was the erased curator, witness, and the survivor at the same time.^[32]

I am positing these aftermaths of the exhibition to articulate the impossibility and removal of a discourse constructed and claimed by myself, as a curator and an Armenian subject, through the desire to decolonize archival gaps. This is a critical reconsideration for my notion of the empty fields as an ongoing destructive condition, due to the ways in which the project and its absent catalogue highlight the contemporaneity of epistemic gaps in the formation of Armenian agency. Such real politics that inevitably come into play, here as one outcome of Empty Fields, are therefore permanently entangled with this period of archival research. In the next phase of my work, thinking further on empty fields endorsing narrative frameworks, I would focus on Armenian diasporic archives and collecting practices in California’s Central Valley.

In the Fields: From Marzovan to Fresno

In moving to the United States to complete my PhD studies,^[33] I was curious to understand what kinds of Armenian communities have been formed in the US and whether I could trace any patterns of knowledge transmission between generations. For the research^[34] I selected Fresno^[35] and Los Angeles,^[36] since these have been major hubs for the Armenian refugee, immigrant, and descendants of the survivors over the past century. Specifically, Fresno in San Joaquin Valley, the traditional homelands of Native American people, presents the largest Armenian diasporic rural farming community.^[37] Interestingly, the layers constituting the diaspora here are manyfold: from the Hamidian massacres (1894–1897) and the early persecutions of Western Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to the 1915 Genocide survivors, from Eastern Armenians escaping from the Bolshevik regime (1917–1930s) to Armenians from the Middle East, migrating because of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), as well as from Iran due to the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The last layers introduce Armenian relocation because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and recently, due to the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War.

Figure 7. Armenians picking wine grapes in the fields, Fresno, California, 19?. The Berge Bulbulian Papers, Henry Madden Library, Special Collections Research Center, Fresno, California. Courtesy: FCCHS Archives.

In Fresno, I generated the research from my position as an Eastern Armenian, now coming from Armenia to the US, looking into the diasporic archives and collections, and exploring what patterns I could or could not identify. What became evident to me is that every time I looked for the “Armenian” definition in archives, I discovered something other, in a sense, displaced or absented yet also forming a new content. One surprising discovery for me was that the members of the first Armenian immigrant relocation and settlement to Fresno were from Marzovan, the location of Manissadjian and his museum. This took place in the late nineteenth century, particularly in the 1870s–1880s, when they were looking for surviving possibilities.^[38] But this “moment in time” is repressive and destructive in the US, as it is the immediate years of the gold rush period, when settler colonizers dispossessed Indigenous people from their lands and subjected them to genocide; meanwhile, African American people continued to be forced into slavery in mines and beyond.^[39]

While my research in Fresno showed no tangible archival records related to Marzovan as the place of “origin,” through community interviews I learned that Armenian relocation to Fresno was conditioned by the beginning of a forced displacement and dispossession in the context of the Hamidian massacres in the Ottoman Empire.^[40] In terms of surviving archival traces, while they are scattered and uncatalogued, the focus of these materials is on the lost homeland rather than on Armenian existence in the Central Valley.^[41] This is central to consider as a new sense of absence. To my question, “What is the ideal archive of Fresno?” local Armenian archivist Malina Zakian told me that oral histories should be the first component, as this has a certain urgency due to the time factor of an aging community. Largely uncatalogued archival items in Fresno include photographs carried by survivors during their displacement, printed materials created by the community, lacework, or old 78 rpm records capturing the longing in the 1920s and ’30s for a lost homeland in the Ottoman Empire. From the 1960s onward, the community preservation included eyewitness accounts from the immediate generation of survivors.^[42] In this context, the Armenian Studies Department at California State University in Fresno has been key in preserving the memory by collecting books, objects, and photographs donated by families.^[43] Yet the provenances of such materials are often missing—to digitize them and create an inventory and searchable metadata for such records that should resonate with the living diaspora will require a minimum of identifying people and locations through a community engagement.

In this regard, the work of Anne J. Gilliland and her focus on affect, impossible records, and imaginaries in archival theory and practice has had a major impact on methods of understanding Indigenous, diasporic, and refugee rights and claims.^[44] When working with diasporic records as displaced archives from their sites of origins, she proposes that “the archival field [needs] to acknowledge, respect, advocate for and act upon the realities of always-in-motion diasporas of records in which multiple parties have rights, interests and diverging points of view, than to try to negotiate ownership, protection and physical relocation of records across complex and contested histories and boundaries, power imbalances and stewardship capabilities.”^[45] In the case of Armenian diasporic records, Gilliland and I have further argued that displaced archives in disputed contexts, as Turkey represents, should also engage with the human experience of displacements and the ways in which records and objects also get “dis-placed, un-placed and re-placed with new meanings.”^[46] For the Armenian diaspora, this reflection is essential to understand as there is no place in which to return archives, because their homeland is now part of Turkey. Thus, community interaction with new localities becomes important in forms of memory, forgetting, and survival that speaks of the multiple natures of displacement itself.

At this point, I want to briefly introduce another discovery in Fresno that was impactful for my research—the new forms of empathetic recognition taking place in the fields. Being dominantly a farming community, Armenians in the Central Valley overlapped with other immigrant and refugee experiences, particularly with Japanese Americans. For example, in the middle of the Simonian Farm opened in 1901 by an Armenian immigrant, there is a twenty-five-foot monument named “Soul Consoling Tower.” Looking like a modern architectural work, this wooden memorial is devoted to the Japanese Americans and their families who were placed in an internment camp at Poston, Arizona, during the Second World War.^[47] The tower was opened in 2013 by Dennis Simonian, the owner of the farm and a third-generation representative of Armenian survivors. He collected all wooden leftovers from the internment camp and commissioned the tower to honor the Japanese American families.^[48] As the signboard indicates, this honor extends to those Japanese Americans who helped him to learn to farm. He situates their persecution within histories of violence, including the one against his own Armenian identity through the Genocide. This connection with Japanese Americans is historical, as their labor played a central role in the development of agriculture in the Central Valley, particularly in peach orchards and vineyards.^[49] During my research in Fresno, this monument was part of the Yonsei Memory Project, a community-oriented initiative by three yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese Americans) artists and writers, Nikiko Masumoto, Dr. Brynn Saito, and Patricia Miye Wakida.^[50] In 2019 the Yonsei Memory Project organized tours connecting the overlaps between Japanese American internment camps and the Gila River Indian Community of the reservation in Arizona. As Nikiko writes, “The concentration camp was built on the Gila River reservation of the Pima Indians, land that they too had been forced onto—two histories of confinement.” ^[51] In other words, the Fresno case and its adjacent places reflect on the complex reality by challenging methods of keeping memory and archival practices.

Figure 8. Soul Consoling Tower in the Simonian Farm, Fresno, California, 2019. Photographer and image rights: Marianna Hovhannisyan.

Metadata Silences as Powerful Entities

Through writing in 2022, I am reactivating my initial exhibition inquiry with the concept of empty fields, firstly to theorize this through the archival gaps and silences as sites of knowledge. By connecting the notion of empty fields as narratives to follow with the Armenian diaspora, I want to conclude by offering some insights about exhibition-making and metadata silences as critical imaginaries.

As it is known, metadata addresses archival descriptive, administrative, structural use, including questions of preservation.^[52] These form the semantics—the ways in which research and search can be generated or associated through metadata standards and protocols. The metadata issues which I formulated as empty fields introduce archival silences, gaps, and absences occurring at the level of cataloguing and digitizing historical records.^[53] Indeed, silences as blanks are politically constructed and/or repressive in as much as repositories inscribe colonial and imperial legacies or have been formed through empires and violence and continue to be unquestioned as systems of emissions. Archival silences are also ideologically created when primary sources function as “third repositories” such as the American Board Archives during the Ottoman Empire for “non-Muslim minorities” (i.e., Armenians and Greeks). Such overlaps between imperial, colonial, and ideological frameworks often produce negative evidence and racialized categories.

There are several responses from the field of archival studies to address such silences.^[54] As scholar Rodney Carter explains, while archival voids indicate domination as “power over” content and context, they should not only be treated in negative terms—on the contrary, they are imbued with a power that can “allow voices to be heard.”^[55] As a methodology, he proposes that professional archivists need to reconsider the roles of exhibitory practices and metadata elements, such as finding aids and description data, in making visible silences, thus turning the power of the archives into the power of voices in order to produce new sites of empowerments for the generations whose lives pass through these repositories.^[56]

In dialogue with archivists’ calls to consider exhibitory practices, the Empty Fields project might be viewed through the concept of “critical fabulation,” as articulated by Saidiya Hartman, a scholar of African American cultural history, slavery, law, and literature. By incarnating Venus, the name given in archives of slavery to an enslaved Black girl or girls, whose “ubiquitous presence” appears as the unknown, the dispossessed, and the dead, Hartman suggests that the critical fabulation allows constellations from the negative voids, remnants of historical research, narrative restraints of suppressed voices and bodies through “a style of creative semi-nonfiction.”^[57] In the case of Empty Fields, the exhibition was shaped around Manissadjian’s catalogue as the writing of the disaster, while narrated through my curatorial voice in dialogue with the creative design framework proposed by Armaly. The discursive, aesthetic, and spatial methodologies of forming a narrative out of archival empty fields/gaps allowed a temporal overlap between the cultural institution in Istanbul, SALT, and Armenian survivors, whose ruptured history passes in and out of the archive.

But further taking into account my concept of empty fields and its relationship to diaspora, I want to conclude by reflecting on two intertwined paths of enquiry that for me inscribe in real time a decolonial imaginary in process and suggest research yet to come. The work of scholar Maria Montenegro illustrates what is at stake in the archival metadata voids. Drawing upon the Indigenous cases as Traditional Knowledge Structures, she states that there is a need to establish ownership over the existing colonial and imperial surviving archival materials as custody and stewardship, as a legal data sovereignty.^[58] Thinking through this, for Manissadjian’s catalogue, the rights holder is “United Church of Christ (UCC), American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), SALT Research.” It is important to recall here that it was because I was invited through a fellowship that I was able to access this archive and uncover new knowledge. The critical issue remains that the Armenian diaspora, especially for those who are descendants of Marzovan, do not have any legal data sovereignty and rights, for example, over Manissadjian’s catalogue, as their legacy and heritage.^[59]

The other path is my discovery of the connection between Marzovan and the first Armenian immigration to Fresno, but more as a broken link. Moreover, what survives as records and artifacts are scattered and uncatalogued yet centered around the Armenian lost homeland in the Ottoman Empire, that is to say, around the void of the Genocide. This led me to understand how one should always be open to follow both the research and the displacement paths, the ways in which they can unfold inherent to human experiences of coping with violence, loss, and survival, and consider the findings within this as an organizational system. Thus, my search for Armenian records in Fresno initiates a first reflection of the compositional structure between myself, my knowledge through the aftermaths of Empty Fields, and the missing centralized diasporic archives. Critically, this guides me to another trajectory, from Simonian’s monument to the Yonsei Memory Project to the dispossessions of the Indigenous people and their relation to the reservations. The discursive link from Marzovan to Fresno to Japanese Americans to the reservations indicates there is still a need for in-depth research unpacking the ways in which there are overlaps, temporalities, and disjunctions between Indigenous, African American, Mexican, diasporic, refugee, immigrant people and communities in the Central Valley, such as Armenian, Sikh, Hmong, and Japanese Americans, just to name a few.^[60] In other words, while initially guided by the search for the “Armenian,” working with the empty fields invites an understanding of layered readings that expand the category “Armenian” to instead suggest an inquiry (and a beginning once again), from which it is possible to critically rethink the archives related to race and racialization, displacement, genocide, indigeneity, refugeetude, and diasporas.

About the Author

Marianna Hovhannisyan is an art historian, author, and research-based curator, currently, the 2022-23 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University. She works at the intersection of postcolonial and decolonial archival and museum studies, visual culture, critical race theories, with the focus on folk studies, theories of art, artifacts, and metadata, and Armenian/West Asian studies. She is the 2019 recipient of the UC Critical Refugee Studies Collective award and often collaborates with the Center for Information as Evidence, GSEIS Dept., Archives and Information Studies, UCLA. As the first EU-funded Hrant Dink Foundation Fellow, she conducted original research in the American Board Archives (Turkey). This resulted in her curatorial exhibition “Empty Fields” (exhibition design concept: Fareed Armaly, 2016, SALT, Istanbul), which uncovered a museum collection dispersed due to the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Other research fellowships include participation in the Getty Consortium Seminar, Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), and Center for Experimental Museology (V-A-C Foundation, Moscow).

[1] Marc Nichanian remarkably contextualizes the aghed—meaning “the catastrophe” in Armenian—in relation to the writings of Armenian woman writer, activist, and survivor Zabel Yesayan/Essayan (1878–1943), who bore witness to the 1909 killings of Armenians in Adana and Cilicia, the events leading up to the genocidal violence. Yesayan used the aghed to name the unspeakable in this context (see her work Among the Ruins, written in 1911). The aghed can be considered similar to the Nakba and Shoah. See Marc Nichanian, “Catastrophic Mourning,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 99–124, and the chapter by David Kazanjian and Nichanian, “Between Genocide and Catastrophe,” 125–147, in the same book.

[2] I am grateful for the conversations with Dr. Lisa Cartwright for this articulation. This text is informed by my unpublished catalogue text as well as my dissertation supervised by Drs. Mariana Wardwell, Cartwright, and Norman Bryson, to whom I am thankful for their ongoing support. My gratitude extends to the critical framework of the seminar, “In the Afterlives and Aftermaths of Ruin,” led by Dr. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University, where I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow.

[3] I am borrowing this formulation of “trans-imperial” subjects from Armenian historian Sebouh D. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). See also the scholarship of Houri Berberian, for example, Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 (New York: Routledge, 2001).

[4] I am not taking the definitions of “Indigenous” and “ancestral land” for granted here, but rather thinking through the work of Maile Arvin. She explains how the indigenous and indigeneity often vanish between the categories of immigrant, citizen, and human. This can be seen in the case of Armenian subjects, who are considered a “non-Muslim” minority in Turkey, diaspora, a refugee, or a national subject. Thus, more accurately, Armenian claims for indigeneity have undergone numerous economic, cultural, and historical transformations as a result of imperialism, modernization, and their self-articulations as a national identity. See on this subject Hrach Bayadyan, Հրաչ Բայադյան, Երևակայելով անցյալը. խորհրդահայ արդիականության պատումներ [Imagining the Past: The Narratives of the Soviet Armenian Modernity] (Yerevan: Epigraph, 2020), and Veronika Zablotsky, “Governing Armenia: The Politics of Development and the Making of Global Diaspora” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2019). See also Maile Arvin, “Analytics of Indigeneity,” in Native Studies Keywords, eds. Stephanie N. Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 119–129.

[5] This should be acknowledged as the Genocide of Armenian, Assyrian, Pontic Greek, and Yazidi people.

[6] Just to name a few, the Caucasus, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, the United States, Canada, Europe, etc. One should also acknowledge that the (Armenian) diaspora is complex, diverse, and never a homogenous formation.

[7] This is also known as Nagorno-Karabakh. In my writings, the discussions related to the Republic of Artsakh are situated within the discourse of the right to self-determination of Armenians in Artsakh as indigenous yet also stateless people and within the longue-durée violence against Armenians in West Asia. In general, see the scholarship of Vicken Cheterian on the first and second wars.

[8] This situation changes every month, as more Armenians are being displaced and more villages are lost to Azerbaijan.

[9] See the proceedings instituted by Armenia against Azerbaijan before the International Court of Justice (UN) with the allegation of the violations of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, part of which includes the destruction of the cultural heritage. See also “Caucasus Heritage Watch” project, accessed May 1, 2022, https://caucasusheritage.cornell.edu/, and Simon Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman, “A Regime Conceals its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture,” Hyperallergic, last modified February 18, 2019, accessed May 1, 2022.

[10] For example, Robin D. G. Kelley, “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 7–28; Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580; Gayatri C. Spivak, Other Asias (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008); Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought, and De-Colonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 7–8 (2009): 1–23; Bruno Brulon Soares and Anna Leshchenko, “Museology in Colonial Contexts: A Call for Decolonisation of Museum Theory,” ICOFOM Study Series 46 (2018): 61–79; Jamila J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, “‘To go beyond’: towards a decolonial archival praxis,” Arch Sci 19 (2019): 71–85.

[11] On such methods, see Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso Books, 2019), and Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191–219.

[12] There were several international and local reviews: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “2016 Highlights,” Frieze (blog), December 19, 2016, accessed April 1, 2022; Emma Harper, “Conflating Histories: Two Exhibitions on the Armenian Legacy in Anatolia,” Ibraaz, July 26, 2016, accessed April 1, 2022, https://www.ibraaz.org/news/156; Helena Vilalta, “Empty Fields and Crying Stones,” Afterall 42 (Autumn/Winter 2016): 144–155; Başak Şenova, “Playing Hopscotch: Empty Fields,” Camera Austria, International, no. 92 (2016): 81–82; and on the repressive aftermaths of the project see Hande Sever, “Empty Fields Revisited,” in Perspectives on In/stability, ed. Delinda Collier and Robyn Farrell (The Art Institute of Chicago Press, 2022), accessed January 03, 202.

[13] I am grateful to the directorial body and the team of SALT as well as ARIT for welcoming this temporal opening during the time of this exhibition project, as well as the Hrant Dink Foundation for initiating it. This project took place in the context of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 2015, and such openings in Turkey should be situated within the critical work undertaken by artists, curators, and scholars from Armenia, Turkey, and the diaspora in the early 2000s up to 2016; for example, Ruben Arevshatyan, Fetih Cetin, Osman Kavala, Ayşe Gül Altınay, Beral Madra, and Armen Marsoobian, just to name a few.

[14] The exhibition was open from April 6 to June 5, 2016, in the venue known as SALT Galata in Istanbul.

[15] The full name is the EU-funded Hrant Dink Foundation’s Turkey-Armenia Fellowship Scheme, 2014–2015. In 2014, SALT sought my assistance during the process of classifying this multilingual archive and subsequently commissioned me to curate an exhibition based on my research. I became the first researcher to have full access to this archive.

[16] SALT used its own altered version of the Dublin Metadata Core in order to provide as much accuracy as possible to inventories, tags, and keywords that can match with the geopolitical and repressive “pasts” of Turkey.

[17] Whenever possible, geographical names have been kept in accordance with my positionality to the subject matter, or with original usage as found in historical records. This is evident in the case of Marzvan (Eastern Armenian spelling), Marzovan (Western Armenian spelling, also an adaptation by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions), Marzovan (referring to Professor Manissadjian’s use in the Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolia College), and Marzovan (appearing in records associated with the missions; it is a reference to the Ancient Greek “Μυρσυφων” (transliterated as “Mersyphòn”). Now, Merzifon is used as the contemporary Turkish name for the same town, plus a district in Amasya Province in the central Black Sea region of Turkey—in general, it remains the most popular version.

[18] He was born in Niksar, then the Ottoman Empire, and died in Detroit, Michigan. The Armenian spelling of his name appears as Ohannes (Agop) Manisacıyan.

[19] Further information about the college and the missions as well as all my research and curatorial texts can be found in the original exhibition guide. See Marianna Hovhannisyan, ed., Empty Fields, exhibition brochure (Istanbul: SALT, 2016).

[20] In the 1880s, Dr. Charles C. Tracy, President of Anatolia College, had an informal interest in collecting local fossils. Joining the college in 1890, Prof. Manissadjian expanded this amateur pursuit into a professional field of study. See Hovhannisyan, Empty Fields, 28.

[21] The eastern part of Anatolia is what is known as the historical Western Armenia, as well as the Armenian Highlands. I am using this term to denote to the original usage of the time period, while I acknowledge that this definition requires a critical deconstruction of its meanings for Armenians, Greeks, Kurdish, and Turkish people.

[22] Marianna Hovhannisyan, “Between the Archival and the Curatorial Acts: Empty Fields as a Case Study,” in Were It as If: Beyond an Institution That Is, eds. Bik van der Pol and Defne Ayas (Rotterdam: Witte de With, 2017), 54–59.

[23] Each object was indexed by number, English and scientific name, area of origin, purchase value or taxidermy cost, and the name of the collector, usually a student or staff member. His attempt to create a unity should be read as a conscious act in opposition to the destruction in 1915.

[24] Hovhannisyan, Empty Fields, 25.

[25] This quote is from the artist’s biography, accessed, April 22, 2022, www.fareedarmaly.net. Helmut Draxler, Coercing Constellations: Space, Reference and Representation in Fareed Armaly (Berlin: b_books, Reihe PoLYpeN, 2007).

[26] This kind of artistic practice and exhibition-making can be seen in Armaly’s Shar(e)d Domains, an individual exhibition project and commission for the archeological exhibition Gaza at the crossroad of civilizations at Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, 2007. See also the discursive component of the exhibition in Fareed Armaly, “Crossroads and Contexts: Interviews on Archaeology in Gaza: Fareed Armaly with Marc-Andre Haldimann, Jawdat Khoudary, Jean-Baptiste Humbert, and Moain Sadeq,” Journal of Palestinian Studies 37, no. 2, issue 146 (Winter 2008): 43–82. The other exhibition, which mapped out Palestinian displacements through roots and routes, archives, and navigation systems is From/To, a large-scale project commissioned by documenta 11, Kassel (artistic director: Okwui Enwezor), based on the 1999 original version.

[27] He was the first scientist to distribute rare bulbs from Asia Minor for companies such as Dammann & Co (Naples, Italy) and the Dutch firm C.G. van Tubergen (1895–1914). I am thankful to Kees Hoog for helping me to reconstruct this history.

[28] My understanding of the concept of “aftermaths” is indebted to the current Pembroke seminar, whose leader and initiator, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, thinking through Black studies and lives, defines it with the aim to “conceptualize ruin along with modalities of survival and persistence, epistemologies of emergence and immanence, praxes of rupture and critique, maneuvers of sustenance and suture.” See Abdur-Rahman, “In the Afterlives and Aftermaths of Ruin” (Open call, Annual Pembroke Seminar, Brown University, 2021), accessed June 22, 2022.

[29] The exhibition guide was printed in three languages—Western Armenian, Turkish, and Eastern Armenian—to embody the multiple perspectives within this archive.

[30] The publication was funded by SALT.

[31] The authors were Hrach Bayadyan, Beverley Butler, Özgür Sevgi Göral, Brian Johnson, Hans-Lukas Krieser, Armen T. Marsoobian, Nazan Maksudyan, Marc Nichanian, and Zeynep Türkyılmaz.

[32] Şeref Etker and Gönenç Göçmengil, “Dilemmas of Web-based Historiography: Prof. J.J. Manissadjian and the Anatolia College Museum in Marzovan, Turkey,” Osmanlı Bilimi Araştırmaları 21, no. 2 (2020): 403–422.

[33] I began my PhD studies in Art History, Criticism, and Theory at the University of California San Diego (2016–2022).

[34] In terms of the archives, I consulted thirty private and institutional repositories in Fresno and Los Angeles and produced eight interviews with community members, six archivists, and librarians. This research in Fresno was funded by the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, supported by the University of California Office of the President Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives.

[35] The archives in Fresno, where I developed the research, included the First Armenian Presbyterian Church, the Armenia Studies Program and Henry Madden Special Collections at the California State University, Fresno Public Library, the William Saroyan Museum, the Armenian Heritage Museum, the Armenian Museum in Fresno, the Armenian Cultural Conservancy (NGO), and the California Armenian Home for senior citizens. I am grateful to Malina Zakian Randy Baloian, Varoujan Der Simonian, Pastor Badveli Harutyunyan, Mary M. Ekmalian, Denis Simonian, and Ralph Kumano for their support and guidance in Fresno.

[36] Exceptions are what the UCLA Armenian collections present as well as the specific testimony collection under the Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles. The Ararat Eskijian Museum has also been a historical place which functions as a museum with an archive, yet its materials are not fully digitized.

[37] I acknowledge that the San Joaquin Valley is a valley rich in the traditions and representation of Native American peoples and cultures. There, Armenians live in the traditional homelands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples, whose diverse tribal communities share stewardship over this land. I also acknowledge that colonialism and stolen lands in the US cannot be separated from the slavery, racism, and forced enslaved labor of African Americans.

[38] The first person was Hagop Seropian and his brothers, who came to Fresno in 1881 and began a grocery business. According to my interviews conducted with Armenian community members, when the Seropians got to Fresno, it was in the beginning stages of its agricultural growth due to irrigation canals and the railroad. In 1883, some forty-five families arrived from Marzovan. As one of the Fresno Armenian community members stated to me in 2019, “It’s more relevant to say, perhaps, that the Seropians’ arrival coincided with the immediate years of gold rush.” In general, see also David Gutman, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885–1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). For rare research on Armenians in San Joaquin Valley, see Berge Bulbulian, The Fresno Armenians: History of a Diaspora Community (Sanger: Word Dancer Press, 2001). Please refer to pages 13–39, explaining Armenian arrivals to Fresno from Marzovan.

[39] See oral histories and resources on this subject at “Gold, Greed, and Genocide,” International Indian Treaty Council, accessed November 20, 2022.

[40] Frank Balekian, personal email correspondence with the author, September 18, 2019. There is a growing body of scholarship, which focuses on this time period and the 1920s, for understanding the racialization of Armenians in the US legal framework and what two different structures of the genocides might share in common. For example, Keith David Watenpaugh explores the concept of “an Indigenous Genocide” in human rights in “Kill the Armenian/Indian; Save the Turk/Man: Carceral Humanitarianism, the Transfer of Children and a Comparative History of Indigenous Genocide,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies (October 19, 2022): 1–33. See also, Sophia Armen, Aram Ghoogasian, and Hrag Vartanian, “Beyond Jermag and Yev Sev: A Roundtable on Armenian American Identity,” Los Angeles Review of Books, last modified September 5, 2020.

[41] See a comprehensive analysis of this research in Anne J. Gilliland and Marianna Hovhannisyan, “Displaced, Un-placed, Re-placed: Armenian Archives and Archival Imaginaries in the US,” in Disputed Archival Heritage, ed. James Lowry (London: Routledge, 2022), 233–261. I am thankful to Gilliland for our collaboration related to Armenian record-keeping practices.

[42] In the context of Fresno, first-generation survivor and filmmaker Michael Hagopian knew of 2,500 immediate survivors, yet he could complete only 15% of these testimonies. See Carla Garapedian, “Armenian Film Foundation,” in The Armenian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide, ed. Alan Whitehorn (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 44–46, or consult the Michael Hagopian Video Collection and the Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection at the Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles.

[43] Dickran Kouymjian is the central figure in this.

[44] See Anne J. Gilliland, Sue McKemmish, and Andrew J. Lau, eds., Research in the Archival Multiverse (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2017), or Anne J. Gilliland and Michelle Caswell, “Records and their imaginaries: imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined,” Archival Science 16, no. 1 (2015): 53–75.

[45] Anne J. Gilliland, “Networking Records in Their Diaspora: A Reconceptualisation of ‘Displaced Records’ in a Postnational World,” in Displaced archives, ed. James Lowry (London: Routledge, 2017), 180.

[46] Gilliland and Hovhannisyan, “Displaced, Un-placed and Re-placed,” 235.

[47] The tower works with light and shadow, similar to Jewish monuments of the Holocaust where one central source of light indicates the sky as hope but also denotes claustrophobic feelings.

[48] The names include Shigeo and Kinuko Hayashi, Masao and Hanako Hayashi, Bob and Masako Nakadoi Mochizuki, Ted and Irene Takahashi, Yosh and Yo Takahashi, and Chuck Takahashi.

[49] David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (New York: HarperOne, 1996).

[50] I am grateful to the Masumoto family for introducing this monument to me. See also “Yonsei Memory Project,” accessed April 28, 2022.

[51] The quote is from Nikiko Masumoto, “My Grandfather’s Shovel Is a Link to My Ancestors,” Sierra Club, last modified March 9, 2020.

[52] On metadata, see Jeffrey Pomerantz, Metadata (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015); Johanna Drucker, “Classification Systems,” in Introduction to Digital Humanities Course Book, eds. Johanna Drucker, David Kim, Iman Salehian, and Anthony Bushong (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, 2014), 20–23; and Anne J. Gilliland, “Setting the Stage,” in Introduction to Metadata, ed. Murtha Baca, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008 [2016]), accessed April 02, 2022.

[53] For more on archival productions of silences in historical records, see Jeannette Allis Bastian, “Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space, and Creation,” Archival Science 6 (2006): 267–284; Verne Harris, “Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizing spatial history through the archives of slavery,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (2015): 134–141; and Wendy M. Duff and Verne Harris, “Stories and Names: Archival description as narrating records and constructing meanings,” Archival Science 2, no. 3 (2002): 263–285.

[54] David Thomas, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson, The Silence of the Archive: Principles and Practice in Records Management and Archives (London: Facet Publishing, 2017).

[55] Rodney G.S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Archivaria 61 (2006): 219, 216–217.

[56] Ibid., 215–233.

[57] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. For a better understanding of the concept of critical fabulation, please refer to Saidiya Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 757–777, and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). “Venus in Two Acts” is a return to a character from Lose Your Mother to an unknown Black girl, in order to expose the failures of archives, historical research, and the impossibility of narrating the social life of Black people ruptured through the destruction of the Atlantic slave trade. Hartman demonstrates the failures of the “reconstruction” that haunts as the afterimage and afterlives. While I am drawing upon the scholarship of Black studies and Indigenous studies, I want to acknowledge that the aim is not to reinforce parallels but to think through temporalities and concepts that might inform the ways in which one might think against violence and its specificities.

[58] Maria Montenegro, “Subverting the universality of metadata standards: The TK labels as a tool to promote Indigenous data sovereignty,” Journal of Documentation 75, no. 4 (2019): 731–749.

[59] The catalogue is accessible on the digital repository of SALT Research under the Creative Commons license. Yet this does not imply data sovereignty as discussed in this section.

[60] This text does not intend to represent the complexity of the experiences in the Central Valley, especially in the contexts of racial segregations, racism, systematic oppressions, and class division. Please consult further with the works that reflect on the places mentioned in this text, such as Curtis Marez, Farm Worker Futurism and Technologies of Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020); or Felix Shielim-Nwaeke Enunwa, “African American Entrepreneurship: Narratives of Fresno County, California, African American Entrepreneurs” (PhD diss., University of San Francisco, 2012). In general, The Fresno Bee daily newspaper remains a primary source for different communities in California.