Lit Review Update 4

I’ve realized that I’m going about this all wrong. I’m going to hold off on generating that blog entry for the Armenian Genocide. It doesn’t make sense to start there, just because I’m done with note-taking for it. That’s the old Talal, trying to go for a quick kill, trying to create the all-important feeling of momentum. This is baseball, not football. There is no momentum. It’s antithetical to the game. It’s about stringing together small actions into a larger sequencing structure. It’s about statistical consistency, not momentum and passion.

I need to look at the bigger project. The truth is that I don’t have a mechanism for evaluating the three accounts of the Armenian Genocide that I’ve read, because I really haven’t done much with the theories in defense of which the original texts were written (when there was a theory—Naimark is a descriptive historian). I need to have each theorist very clearly spelled out in my mind. Then, I can evaluate how each theorist does with respect to each case.

Second, I’m starting a literature review that I will use in the theory chapter. This isn’t the theory chapter. I can’t keep thinking I can just distill as much as I need out of the source material and create a complex but compact document. That would require a great deal of short-term recall. I’ll get lost and the whole thing will fall apart. I need to write a lit review, then distill that written review to create part of the theory chapter. No skipping steps. In the process, I’ll read a lot about several ethnic cleansings.

So theorists we’re looking at will be: Ervin Staub, Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Stuart Kaufman, Michael Mann and Zeynep Bulutgil. Two historical tours of ethnic cleansings, by Norman Naimark and Benjamin Lieberman will help provide case material. We’ll read through the theory chapters for each, and then go through the case chapters cleansing by cleansing. If I find shorter historical chapters that aren’t in these sources, I’ll include them in the case analysis, but I’m not going to run out and get books. This lit review has to be written by January.

Tomorrow evening, we start with the theory chapters from Staub.