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Paper short abstract:

How does ecology make Empires crumble? How to register genocidal violence while recording the resurgence of multispecies life in occupied geographies in the context of genocide denialism? This paper considers the Armenian genocide through its ecological remnants and resistant roots on Tigris shores.

Paper long abstract:

How does ecology make Empires crumble? This paper considers the Armenian genocide through its ecological remnants and resistant roots on Tigris shores in Upper Mesopotamia.

"Resistant roots" is a way to theorize ecology as an outcome and archive of genocidal devastation. I propose an ecological perspective that makes human and nonhuman life-and-death politics visible and concrete where forms of research that relegate ecological life to a derivative cannot. Against the narrative arc of the sovereign archive of the Turkish state that still denies the genocide ever occurred, the centenarian mulberry trees on shores of Tigris River today are better be conceptualized as un-settling ecological roots. These centenarian trees are entrenched in the memory of diasporic Armenians as commemorative sites of homeliness as well as destruction. Trees, rivers, mountains, and gardens: They all do commemorate.

After Christina Sharpe (2016), I move beyond the mainstream notion of archival factuality to center "roots" as a racial and decolonial resource of critical knowledge that pushes back against genocide denialism. The paper interrupts genocidal settler archives that work to institute a settled ethos through erasure, confiscation, and reappropriation of ecological sites and to determine what and who is recognizable as part of a shared world or denied from it. Through photoshopped images, the paper will amplify the ways in which ecology has been pushed out the order of a dignified life and reduced to a background effect despite its analytical power to evidence Armenian nativity to land and the magnitude of genocidal massacres sites.