Elyse Semerdjian

Remnants (eBook, ePUB)

Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A groundbreaking and profoundly moving exploration of the Armenian genocide, told through the traces left in the memories and on the bodies of its women survivors.

Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or, alternatively, a national stain, and the bodies of women and children figured centrally within the Armenian communal memory and humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants, these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and-in what remains of those lives a century afterward-bones.

With this book, Elyse Semerdjian offers a feminist reading of the Armenian Genocide. She explores how the Ottoman Armenian communal body was dis-membered, disfigured, and later re-membered by the survivor community. Gathering individual memories and archival fragments, she writes a deeply personal history, and issues a call to break open the archival record in order to embrace affect and memory. Traces of women and children rescued during and after the war are reconstructed to center the quietest voices in the historical record. This daring work embraces physical and archival remnants, the imprinted negatives of once living bodies, as a space of radical possibility within Armenian prosthetic memory and a necessary way to recognize the absence that remains.

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, D ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 398
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. August 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781503636132
• Artikelnr.: 68092543

Autorenporträt

Elyse Semerdjian is the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She is the author of "Off the Straight Path": Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (2008).

Inhaltsangabe

1. Zabel's Pen: Gender, Body Snatching, and the Armenian Genocide
2. Weaponizing Shame: Dis-memberment of the Armenian Collective Body
3. Rescuing "Kittens" in the Desert: The Armenian Humanitarian Relief
Effort
4. Recovering Survivors in Aleppo, Replanting Bodies in Syria's Armenian
Colonies
5. "Changelings" and "Halflings": Finding the Armenian Buried inside the
Islamized Child
6. Aurora's Body, Humanitarianism, and the Pornography of Suffering
7. What Lies beneath Grandma's Tattoos? Traumatic Memories of Inked Skin
8. Wounded Whiteness: Branded Captives from the Old West to the Ottoman
East
9. Removing the "Brand of Shame," Rehabilitating Armenian Skin
10. Counternarratives of Tribal Tattoos and Survivor Agency
11. If These Bones Could Speak: Early Armenian Pilgrimages to Dayr al-Zur
12. Feeling Their Way through the Desert: Affective Itineraries of
"Non-Sites of Memory"
13. Bone Memory: Community, Ritual, and Memory Work in the Syrian Desert