Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:09:19.833Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Armenian Genocide, AKA the Elephant in the Room

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2015

Ayda Erbal
Ayda Erbal*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, New York University, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The summer of 2015 will perhaps be remembered as a watershed moment in the annals of racism in the United States. What had been normalized for decades by the southern states and giant retailers in “postracist” America was institutionally delegitimized almost overnight. Upping the ante, the department store giant Macy's announced it will discontinue Donald Trump merchandise because of Trump's racist remarks. A mere half century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in a perfect act of Foucauldian governmentality and market regulation from above, American business interests aggressively interfered in redefining the discursive and symbolic boundaries of the new mainstream normativity and truth in the United States. One can safely say that symbolic and actual denial of slavery and racist essentialism as normalized discourses in mainstream US culture and scholarship took another institutional blow, even though some reactionary book review here and there can still make its way into the mainstream, and even though defeating “dog whistle politics” is much more difficult than defeating outright racist symbols or speech.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , November 2015 , pp. 783 - 790
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

Author's note: I thank Marc Mamigonian, Seyhan Bayraktar, and the editors of IJMES for their editorial comments and patience.

1 See The Economist's apology and retraction: “Our Withdrawn Review ‘Blood Cotton,’” The Economist, 4 September 2014, accessed 7 July 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/books/21615864-how-slaves-built-american-capitalism-blood-cotton; and López, Ian Haney, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

2 See Vryonis, Speros, The Turkish State and History: Clio Meets the Grey Wolf, 2nd ed. (Athens: Aristide D. Caratzas Publishers, 1992), 79–136Google Scholar; Matossian, Lou Ann, “Politics, Scholarship, and the Armenian Genocide,” Armenian Reporter 73 (2008): A3Google Scholar; Mamigonian, Marc A., “Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide in American Scholarship: Denialism as Manufactured Controversy,” Genocide Studies International 9 (2015): 61–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Luke Rosiak, “Defense Contractors Join Turkish Lobbying Effort in Pursuit of Arms Deals,” Sunlight Foundation Blog, accessed 7 July 2015, http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2009/09/17/defense-contractors-join-turkish-lobbying-effort-in-pursuit-of/.

3 Talin Suciyan's unpublished dissertation, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: State Policies, Society and Everyday Life deals with what she calls, after Bourdieu, a “denialist habitus.” For an interview with Suciyan by Varak Ketsamanian, see “Examining ‘the Denialist Habitus in Post-Genocidal Turkey,” Armenian Weekly, accessed 7 July 2015, http://armenianweekly.com/2013/11/11/examining-the-denialist-habitus-in-post-genocidal-turkey/.

4 Bloxham, Donald, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Quataert, Donald, “The Massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the Writing of Ottoman History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37 (2006): 249–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For the letter, see Vryonis, The Turkish State and History, 80.

7 Though Yeşilada's main reason was his health, he also showed concern about what happened to Quataert. For more details, see Susan Kinzie, “Board Members Resign to Protest Chair's Ousting,” 5 July 2008, accessed 7 July 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402408.html.

8 Vryonis, The Turkish State and History, 80.

9 Lowry, Heath W., “The State of the Field: A Retrospective Overview and Assessment of Ottoman Studies in the United States and Canada,” The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, 24 (2000): 65–119Google Scholar; Reed, Howard A., Middle East Journal 51 (1997): 15–31Google Scholar.

10 Smith, Roger W., Markusen, Eric, and Jay Lifton, Robert, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9 (1995): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 The memory boom in social sciences in Turkey, albeit not without its own problems, is crowded more and more by cultural and literary studies scholars, political scientists, historical sociologists, anthropologists, and a number of independent researchers both within and outside Turkey. There's also a new generation of historians particularly in state and particularly private universities who may challenge the field from within in the near future.

12 Kasaba, Reşat, ed., The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4, Turkey in the Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Hanioğlu, Şükrü, “The Second Constitutional Period, 1908–1918,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, 62–111Google Scholar.

14 See Kayalı, “The Struggle for Independence,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, 112–46; and Hamit Bozarslan, “Kurds and the Turkish State,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, 333–56.

15 Bozarslan's chapter also stands out in the volume for its vigilance regarding post-Dersim silence.

16 Sophisticated denial is an argument I share with Seyhan Bayraktar, although we address it in somewhat different ways.

17 For a very preliminary sketching of certain elements of this sophisticated denial and racialized discourse, which I co-authored with Talin Suciyan, see “One Hundred Years of Abandonment,” 29 April 2011, accessed 11 July 2015, http://armenianweekly.com/2011/04/29/erbal-and-suciyan-one-hundred-years-of-abandonment/.

18 For a history of Turkey taking into account this dimension of internal colonization and redistribution, see Üngör, Uğur Ümit, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Albeit not officially admitted until very recently, there are different kinds and different degrees of segregation (institutional and otherwise).

20 Mann, Michael talks about a number of colonial settler variants in his Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but not within this state–civil society dimension.

21 Zürcher, Erik Jan, “The Role of Historians of Turkey in the Study of Armenian Genocide,” Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey (ResearchTurkey) 4 (2015): 12–17Google Scholar.

22 See MESA CAF letter written by MESA President Suad Joseph, 16 November 2011, accessed 7 July 2015, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-turk&month=1111&week=c&msg=mH1nWvMqOOYC9qd/HrPFmQ&user=&pw=.

23 See Cleveland, William, A History of the Modern Middle East, 3rd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), 151–52Google Scholar; Gelvin, James, The Modern Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 181Google Scholar; and Mansfield, Peter and Pelham, Nicolas, A History of the Middle East, 4th ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2013)Google Scholar. Mansfield and Pelham give a bit of a context about the Congress of Berlin and Muslim Circassian and Kurdish attacks on Armenians, quickly rehash the “Armenian nationalists demanded national independence” line, and give relatively wide coverage of the 1895–96 massacres, but they leave out the genocide.

24 See Kamrava, Mehran, The Modern Middle East: A Political History since World War I (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005), 380Google Scholar. Kinross tends to downplay the extent of the “Armenian Genocide” by putting the number of dead at half a million. Most other historians, however, including Lewis, put the number at one and a half million. See Kinross, , The Ottoman Centuries (New York: Harper Prennial, 1979), 607Google Scholar; and Lewis, , The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 356Google Scholar.

25 It goes without saying that secondary school social science textbooks in the United States have been a constant interest to Turkey. For a recent take on the content and framing of high school history textbooks' Armenian Genocide coverage, see Lindquist, David H., “Textbook Coverage of the Destruction of the Armenians,” Journal of International Social Studies 2 (2012): 26–35Google Scholar.

26 For an elaborate discussion of this issue in regard to the earlier literature, see Der Matossian, Bedross, “The Taboo within the Taboo: The Fate of ‘Armenian Capital’ at the End of the Ottoman Empire,” European Journal of Turkish Studies, 6 October 2011, accessed 7 July 2015, http://ejts.revues.org/4411Google Scholar.

27 Hür, Ayşe, “Akıl Tutulması, Vicdan Tutulması,” Radikal 2, 15 October 2006, accessed 7 July 2015, http://www.radikal.com.tr/radikal2/akil_tutulmasi_vicdan_tutulmasi-874263Google Scholar.

28 Title VI Area Studies and its language training programs were part of the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which was tied to US Cold War efforts.

29 Parkinson, Anna, “Adorno on the Airwaves: Feeling Reason, Educating Emotions,” German Politics & Society 32 (2014): 43–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 On Pope Francis' letter, see Yardley, Jim and Arsu, Şebnem, “Pope Calls Killings of Armenians ‘Genocide,’ Provoking Turkish Anger,” New York Times, 12 April 2015, accessed 7 July 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/world/europe/pope-calls-killings-of-armenians-genocide-provoking-turkish-anger.html?_r=0Google Scholar. For the European parliament press release, see “Armenian Genocide Centenary: MEPs Urge Turkey and Armenia to Normalize Relations,” 15 April 2015, accessed 7 July 2015, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20150413IPR41671/html/Armenian-genocide-centenary-MEPs-urge-Turkey-and-Armenia-to-normalize-relations.