Description
By (author) Al-Rustom, Hakem Amer
Short /annotation:
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.
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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.
Table of contents:
Beginnings
Appreciation
Introduction
1. Killing the Infidel: Armenian Erasures as Turkey’s Counter-Histories
2. Minoritized by Law: Lausanne as a Treaty of Counter-Sovereignty
3. Anatolian Fragments: The Life Stories of Three Survivors
4. Saving or Displacing? Resettling Armenians in Istanbul and Paris
5. New Conceptions of Belonging: Armenianness Reimagined in France
6. Enduring Denativization, Enduring Presence
An Epilogue of Return
Notes
Index
Review quote:
In this groundbreaking ethnographic study, Al-Rustom demonstrates how the major crime perpetrated against the Armenians during World War I cannot be understood solely from the prism of genocidal violence and its rippling effects; instead, it requires an understanding of the overarching structure that contributes to the continuous erasure of Armenians from the Armenian lands, monuments, cities and villages through the process of denativization.
Review quote:
Enduring Erasures breathes life into Armenian survivance—not merely survival or survivors, but survivance as it has been used in Native American studies: an ongoing, collective life in the face of catastrophe, where life means more and less than any nation could bear. Al-Rustom evades the well-worn roads of nationalism, both diasporic and statist, to wander like the flâneur away from what Walter Benjamin called “the great reminiscences, the historical frissons…all so much junk,” and toward the sometimes terrible beauty of the everyday. Brilliantly combining history, ethnography, critical theory, and close reading, Al-Rustom reveals how those who would be thrown away endure, asserting their presence against the tide of erasure. The Armenity revealed in these afterlives of genocide might not appeal to the defenders of old orders—which is precisely why we have long needed this book.
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