Remembering a Massacre: How Did the Rise of Oral History as a Methodology Improve Dersim Studies?

Dersim, an eastern province of Turkey whose name was changed to Tunceli by a 1935 law and whose borders were redefined for spatial control in the early Republican period, witnessed a bloody massacre executed by the Turkish army in 1937–1938. The massacre has become a “secret” over the course of time, and even critical Turkish literature has refrained from discussing the role of the Turkish state in it until recently. This paper aims to scrutinize the rise of oral history as a methodology used to study the Dersim massacre. In this paper, based on a review of the literature, the author argues that starting in the 1990s a new current using primarily oral sources has appeared.