Déjà Vu at the Archive: Photography, national narratives and the multiple histories of the Smyrna Fire

This is a post-print version (after triple blind peer review, before copy-editing) accepted for publication by the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. It is expected to be published in 2020 (Spring). 

As original primary sources remain central to history writing, researchers strive to find new, unpublished documents. Each archival discovery is perceived to relieve the research work from existential anxiety, but like any other discovery, it is assumed to happen only once. Should the document be encountered by the researcher a second time, elsewhere, in a different archive or collection, the encounter often does not acquire the same significance and the document might be bypassed easily. Visual documents in particular, which­ have at times been perceived as too unreliable while at others treated as authoritative testimonies, present additional challenges of analysis when found in multiple contexts. However, what if reencountering the same material in different archives is key to unfolding its meanings and histories? What if such archival reencounters deserve being sought after rather than avoided? These questions are especially worthy of exploration when the research concerns sites and histories of conflict, in which archival material is often destroyed, withheld or heavily politicised. In light of research on photographs of the 1922 Smyrna Fire in Greek, Turkish and American archives, this paper explores the potential of archival reencounters to expand and enrich historiographical analysis.