February 13, 5:00-8:30pm | Michigan League, Hussey Room
February 14, 10am-5pm | Room 555 Weiser Hall
Organizers: Karen Jallatyan, Anoush Suni, 2019-20 Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellows, U-M, and Hakem Al-Rustom, Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History, U-M.
As a geography and a concept, Western Armenia is a contested category. The same territory is at once imagined and claimed by disparate yet overlapping groups in often mutually exclusive ways as Western Armenia, Eastern Turkey, and Northern Kurdistan. This geography has been home to many peoples over centuries, including Armenians until the 1915 Catastrophe decimated the Ottoman Armenian community and scattered its survivors across the world, where they founded new homes in the diaspora.
As a result of the rupture of 1915, the Armenian Diaspora came into intimate contact with other communities across the globe. At the same time, on the ancestral lands of the exiled Western Armenians, the material and immaterial remnants of their community live on, animated by the memories and narratives recounted by the muslim Kurds, Turks, and Arabs who continue to live there. Taken together, these constitute two asymmetrically mirroring spaces in which afterlives of Western Armenia continue to develop in dynamic relationships with contemporary political and social processes. What are the afterlives of these histories, communities, and trajectories bound up in the notion of Western Armenia? What are the ongoing effects of the 1915 Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, both in the geography where the mass killing and expropriation took place a century ago and in the diasporic communities where Armenians continue to live today? How are histories of violence and exile inscribed both on the landscape through ruins and in the memories of local communities? And how are they reinterpreted and expressed through literature, art, and language?
Cosponsors: College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; Departments of Anthropology, Comparative Literature, and History; Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies; Global Islamic Studies Center; Global Theories of Critique; and Institute for the Humanities.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2020
Hussey Room, Michigan League, 911 North University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
5 – 5:10 PM OPENING REMARKS
Melanie Tanielian, University of Michigan
5:10 – 7 PM ON THE AFTERLIVES OF CATASTROPHE
Ayşe Parla, Boston University
“A Ghost in the Courtroom: Genocide, Justice, and a Speculative Reading of the Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian”
David Marriott, Pennsylvania State University
“The Unhomely”
Moderator: David Kazanjian, University of Pennsylvania
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2020
Room 555, Weiser Hall, 500 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
10 – 10:10 AM OPENING REMARKS
Hakem Al-Rustom, University of Michigan
10:10 AM – 12 PM REMNANTS
Anoush Suni, University of Michigan
“Echoes of the Past in Spaces of Ruin: Afterlives of Genocide in Van”
Özge Korkmaz, University of Michigan
“Historical Blame, Kurds, Armenians and the State”
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, University of Pennsylvania
“Animating Archives and Tales of Hearsay: A Case Study in Historical Redaction”
Discussant: Helmut Puff, University of Michigan
12 – 1:30 PM Break
1:30 – 3:10 PM DIASPORAS
Karen Jallatyan, University of Michigan
“Of Stones of Haiti and Hayastan: Towards a Critically Comparative Discourse of Diasporic Becoming”
Arakel Minassian, University of Michigan
“The Complexity of Returning to Western Armenia in Anna Davtʻyan’s “Diarbekʻir: kʻur”
Discussant: Marlon Sales, University of Michigan
3:10 – 3:30 PM Break
3:30 – 5 PM ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
David Kazanjian, University of Pennsylvania and Ayşe Parla, Boston University
