Remnants : embodied archives of the Armenian Genocide / Elyse Semerdjian.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Semerdjian, Elyse, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Armenian Genocide, 1915-1923--Psychological aspects.

Armenian Genocide, 1915-1923.

Armenian Genocide survivors--History.

Armenian Genocide survivors.

Women genocide survivors--History.

Women genocide survivors.

Human body--Symbolic aspects.

Human body.

Collective memory--Armenia.

Collective memory.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (402 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2023]

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Zabel's pen : gender, body snatching, and the Armenian Genocide

Weaponizing shame : dis-memberment of the Armenian collective body

Rescuing "kittens" in the desert : the Armenian humanitarian relief effort

Recovering survivors in Aleppo, replanting bodies in Syria's Armenian colonies

Changelings and halflings : finding the Armenian buried inside the Islamized child

Aurora's body, humanitarianism, and the pornography of suffering

What lies beneath grandma's tattoos? : traumatic memories of inked skin

Wounded whiteness : branded captives from the Old West to the Ottoman East

Removing the "brand of shame," rehabilitating Armenian skin

Counternarratives of tribal tattoos and survivor agency

If these bones could speak : early Armenian pilgrimages to Dayr al-Zur

Feeling their way through the desert : affective itineraries of "non-sites of memory"

Bone memory : community, ritual, and memory work in the Syrian desert

Epilogue : bone on bone.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Semerdjian, Elyse Remnants

ISBN:

9781503636132

1503636135

OCLC:

1380464884