Enduring erasures : afterlives of the Armenian genocide /
"During World War I, the Ottoman Armenian population was largely decimated through the genocidal policies of mass annihilation, deportations, and death marches. After the war ended, the wide majority of survivors became refugees and continued living in exile, forming diasporic communities aroun...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2026]
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| Series: | Religion, culture, and public life.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "During World War I, the Ottoman Armenian population was largely decimated through the genocidal policies of mass annihilation, deportations, and death marches. After the war ended, the wide majority of survivors became refugees and continued living in exile, forming diasporic communities around the globe. Only a small fraction of the survivors remained in their homelands when the Republic of Turkey was established in 1923; they are the focus of the book. Turkish and Armenian historiographies have diverged in their understanding and interpretation of the significance of the war yet converge in silencing Armenian Turks, thus distancing them from their histories and societies. By taking the parallel silences between two opposing nationalist accounts as a starting point, the book investigates the ways in which these survivors (as Eastern Orthodox Christians) have been racialized (as non-Turks) and erased in postimperial nationalist public life, history, and sociocultural imagination. Afterlives of Genocide employs anthropological methods to explore between the cracks of history in the absence of an archive. It traces the everyday lives of those who were silenced and turned into a foreign minority because of their ethnoreligious identity both in Turkey and in France, where many emigrated in the 1970s. Hakem Amer al-Rustom argues that the ongoing Armenian dispossession, mandatory conversion to Islam, forced emigration, destruction of physical homeland, and estrangement from language and cultural traditions, which began before the systematic genocide during WWI and continues today and which he designates by the term denativization, is not only an afterlife but a continuous process that includes not only provable events and state actions but also the experiences of those so treated. The denativization of the Armenian people is not sui generis but shared by multiple indigenous groups in Anatolian Turkey--Kurds, Alevis, Rum Greeks, and Jews--and indeed by other global postcolonial populations subject to the annihilating violence of empires and states. It challenges the nationalist binaries central to much historiographic work, including the moralist identitarian binaries of victim versus victimizer"-- |
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| Physical Description: | xxvi, 273 pages : illustrations (black and white), maps ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231213646 0231213646 9780231213653 0231213654 |