Acts of Defacement, Memories of Loss: <em>Ghostly Effects of the “Armenian Crisis” in Mardin, Southeastern Turkey</em>

Abstract

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The Armenian Genocide in the Kurdish Novel: Restructuring Identity through Collective Memory

“…44 On the other hand, with the insistent treatment of the violence in the region's recent past, foregrounding the memory-history relationship, Kurdish authors have turned the emerging Kurdish literature into a space of memory. This parallels the findings of fieldbased oral history research carried out among the Kurds (Biner 2010;Ege 2011; The Armenian Genocide in the Kurdish Novel: Restructuring Identity through Co...…”

“…23 All of these initiatives can also be interpreted as a declaration of intention by the Kurdish political circles to confront the genocidal past (cf. Scalbert-Yücel 2015;Ayata 2009;Biner 2010). The increasing presence of the memory of 1915 as a new current in Kurdish literature, which this article has described, should be understood as an extension of these efforts to confront the past.…”

“…Quite a few of the stories are shaped around the witnessing and experiences of the survivors, which creates the impression that the authors develop narratives based on similar stories that they have heard in real life. In fact, recent research in the oral history of the Diyarbakir (Çelik, Dinç 2015), Mardin (Biner 2010) and Van (Ege 2011) regions has revealed that, throughout the past decades, there has been a remarkable transmission of memory through the personal witnessing and experiences of the women and children who survived the genocide and lived among the Kurds, most of the time as Muslims of a specific category termed bavfileh, literally "those from Christian parents." 19 40 It thus seems as if the authors reproduce in literary form the witnessing accounts that they have acquired through their subjective experiences and encounters with the collective memory of their social milieus, thanks to the robust memory and narrative circulation regarding the genocide and the Armenians within Kurdish society.…”

History's remainders: On time and objects after conflict in Cyprus

“…And a small body of recent work has begun to address the absent presences of postconflict landscapes and the ways persons live within them (esp. Bartov ; Bear ; Biner ; Hirsch and Spitzer ; Mazower ; Mehta and Chatterji ). The work of Barbara Bender and Tim Ingold on temporality and landscape and Dylan Trigg on the phenomenology of memory and place may also be taken as background here (see Bender ; Ingold ; Trigg ).…”

Multiple imaginations of the state: understanding a mobile conflict about justice and accountability from the perspective of Assyrian–Syriac communities

“…For an analysis of the involvement of notable Kurdish families and a comparison of the situation between Armenians and Syriac Christians in Diyarbakir and Mardin, see Ü ngör (2006,2009). For an ethnographic analysis of the memories of the 1915 massacres in the city of Mardin, see Biner (2010). 11.…”