Browsing by Subject "Armenians"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Broken (his)tories inside restored walls : Kurds, Armenians and the cultural politics of reconstruction in urban Diyarbakir, Turkey(2014-06-25) Sengul, Serap Ruken; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Stewart, Kathleen C; Speed, Shannon; Cvetkovich, AnnAn old and long-contested city located in Northern Mesopotamia, Diyarbakır was multiply decimated and refashioned throughout the twentieth century. After serving as a coordinating center of the Armenian Genocide, the city became a strategic target of Turkish Republican policies of Turkifying history, space and the Kurds, and then the epicenter of Kurdish struggle as of 1970s. Since the 2000s, a comprehensive politics of reconstruction organized around an oppositional idiom of multiculturalism has brought Diyarbakır’s ancient urban historical heritage to the fore of the conflict between the Kurds and the Turkish state. In this process, a wide range of critical actors, including Kurdish dissidents, articulated for Diyarbakır a powerful “city of culture” image for reclaiming the city’s violently foreclosed non-Turkish (Kurdish) and non-Muslim (Armenian) heritages. However, the revelatory promise of this new representational regime was limited by rendering the meaning and significance of all phenomena that circulated in the city as witness to Diyarbakir’s cosmopolitan cultural heritage. As a result, the disquieting histories of political violence of the recent past often remained suppressed. Furthermore, because the city as exterior space is typically coded as male, this narrative put forward an archive of Diyarbakir’s past and present as essentially male, imagined and narrated through a middle-class male gaze, experience and voice. Based on eighteen-months of fieldwork begun in August 2006 followed by archival and secondary research at multiple sites, this dissertation critically analyzes the cultural politics of reconstruction in Diyarbakır by unpacking its culturalist and classed overdeterminations. Specifically, I take this politics as an entry point into differently embodied histories and experiences of Kurdishness, Armeniannes, and manhood involved in the processes of Turkish state-making and Kurdish nation-building in the city for the past century. I do this by tracing alternative genealogies of four gendered figures, namely Kirve, “the uncircumcised terrorist,” șehir çocuğu, and qirix, which have effectively marked male experiences of violence, oppression and struggle from time of the Armenian genocide to the present. This work contributes to ethnography of the Kurds, Armenians and the Turkish state, as well as to literatures on state sovereignty, nationalism, gender and masculinity, and urban geographies of (post)conflict.Item Kurdish-Christian intercommunal relations : the sectarianization of northern Ottoman-Iranian borderlands, 1830-1914(2018-05-03) Aminpour, Mardin Ahmad; Aghaie, Kamran Scot; Di-Capua, Yoav; Ates, Sabri; Louis, William R.The catastrophic Armenian genocide of 1915 has long set the trend for the study of intercommunal relations between Kurdish and Christian groups of Ottoman East Anatolia and northwest Iran. In the process, Russian and the Ottoman Empires have been identified as key players in exploiting ethnoreligious distinctions to the advantage of imperial centers and at the expense of the inhabitants of Ottoman East Anatolia. However, the crucial impact that the process of Ottoman-Iranian boundary-making left on intercommunal relations has been understudied. This dissertation traces the impact of the frontier delimitation process on intercommunal relations among ethnoreligious groups straddling the northwest stretch of the Ottoman-Iranian borders. This study proposes that the process of making the Ottoman-Iranian boundaries, which involved redefinitions of sovereignty and subjecthood as preambles to the emergence of the modern states of Iran and Turkey, led to an intense imperial rivalry over the religious identity of imperial subjects of the frontier. Interest and investment in the religious identities of overlapping borderland populations sprang from rival empires’ desire to rejuvenate their compromised sovereignty among their frontiers through strengthening their loyalty and allegiance. The presence of foreign missions and consuls and native subjects with extralegal statuses complicated such imperial efforts, and ultimately worked as contributing factor to the sectarianization of the borderland populations’ communal visions and boundaries. The missions, foreign consuls, and travelers helped to construct a sectarian narrative of intercommunal conflict as they too stressed the religious distinctions of different communities through disproportionate attention to the welfare and education of the Christian minorities. Over time, imperial and missionary rivalry and discriminatory policies of prioritizing the wishes of one group over another’s, led to the emergence of sectarian communities with distinctive communal boundaries and aspirations that could hardly be reconciled. When wartime conditions were imposed on the borderland populations in 1915, sectarianized communities brutalized each other, sending untold number of people to their deaths in the process