BIBFRAME Work

Title

Enduring erasures

Other Titles (e.g. Variant)

Afterlives of the Armenian genocide

Type

  • Monograph
  • Text

Contribution

Subject

  • Genocide survivors--Armenia--History--20th century (LCSH)
  • Armenian Church--Turkey. (LCSH)
  • Armenians--France--History--20th century (LCSH)
  • Armenian Genocide, 1915-1923 (LCSH)
  • Armenians--Turkey--History--20th century (LCSH)
  • Armenian diaspora (LCSH)

Language

Classification

Content

Supplementary content

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"-- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Killing the infidel : silenced Armenian narratives in Turkish history -- Armenian minoritization under the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 -- Out of Anatolia : the life stories of three survivors -- A rupture in cultural belonging -- New conceptions of being Armenian in France -- Enduring denativization.

Authorized Access Point

Al-Rustom, Hakem Amer. Enduring erasures

Geographic Coverage

Admin Metadata

  • Date: 2026-09-11T20:17:58.714084+00:00
  • Agent: cbc
  • Status: c
  • Derived from: 23958213

Admin Metadata

  • Date: 2026-09-11
  • Cataloger id: Unknown
  • Description level: http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/bibframe-2-6-0/
  • Description language: eng
  • Description authentication: pcc

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