Paper short abstract:

This presentation will document and analyze commemorative events since 2005 which constitute the most recent stage of a longer coming to memory of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. I will critically engage with frames of remembrance used in these events and question their politics of representation.

Paper long abstract:

My presentation will document and analyze a series of commemorative events since 2005 which constitute the most recent stage of a longer coming to memory of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. Despite widespread recognition of the genocide internationally, among leading Turkish intellectuals and public figures, and in the Armenian community, the Turkish government continues to maintain an official policy of denial.

Until very recently it was taboo to openly mark the genocide in Turkey. However, beginning with the Human Rights Association's commemorative initiative in 2005, the landscape of genocide memory has begun to change. April 24 has begun to be memorialized in Turkey as the critical day that marks the CUP government's arrest and deportation to their death in 1915 of leading members of the Armenian community in Istanbul. In 2010, a group calling itself Say Stop to Racism and Nationalism, also began to organize public commemorations of the atrocities against the Ottoman Armenians. The time is apt to reconsider how the genocide is now being discussed and remembered in Turkey.

My presentation will not only document these recent commemorations with some accompanying images, but analyze the factors that made the coming-to-memory possible in Turkey within a shifting political and discursive terrain. I will outline the productive nature of this emerging commemorative culture at the same time as I note its present limits. I will critically engage with frames of remembrance used by the agents of memory in their interventions and question their politics of representation.