"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"--
During World War I, the Ottoman Armenian population was subjected to genocidal violence. The survivors largely fled Anatolia, forming diasporic communities around the world. Some Armenians, however, remained in what became the Republic of Turkey, and descendants of survivors still live there today as citizens of the state that once sought their annihilation. Despite their continued presence, Armenians in Turkey face ongoing exclusion and erasure from public life and collective memory.
Enduring Erasures is a historical ethnography of survival in the aftermath of catastrophe, examining how the specter of genocide still looms over the lives of the survivors descendants and the social fabric of Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Istanbul and Paris, Hakem Amer Al-Rustom offers a nuanced account of the daily existence of Armenians in Turkey and the broader Armenian experience in the diaspora. He develops the concept of denativization to analyze how Armenians were rendered into foreigners in their ancestral lands before, during, and after the genocide, showing how the erasure of Armenian presence and identity continues to this day both in Turkey and among the diaspora in France. Interdisciplinary and meticulously researched, Enduring Erasures challenges deeply ingrained nationalist histories and provides a powerful testament to the indelible mark that dispossession has left on Armenian lives. Emphasizing the human stories and personal narratives that anchor its historical analysis, this book is an essential read for those interested in the intersections of memory, identity, and political violence.
Enduring Erasures is a historical ethnography of survival in the aftermath of catastrophe, examining how the specter of the Armenian genocide still looms over the lives of the survivors descendants and the social fabric of Turkey.
