Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T01:35:08.858Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Teaching the Armenian Genocide in Turkey: Curriculum, Methods, and Sources

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

Since 2001, I Have Been Teaching Courses in Cultural Studies, European and Turkish Literature, Modern Drama, and Gender and sexuality studies at Sabancı University in Istanbul. During my fifteen years of teaching undergraduate and graduate students, the Armenian genocide was a particularly challenging theme to bring into the classroom. Even at Sabancı University, one of the rare liberal universities in Turkey to offer courses that challenge Turkish national myths, most students, including those who graduated from “liberal” high schools, had received a nationalist education and came to college either not knowing anything about the Armenian genocide or denying it altogether. Denial of the Armenian genocide is still pervasive in Turkey; 1915 is identified in history textbooks as the year of the Battle of Gallipoli, the most important Ottoman victory against the British and French naval forces during World War I. For most of the twentieth century and up until 2005, when the seminal Ottoman Armenians Conference opened a public discussion of the topic, silence regarding the deportation and genocide of the Ottoman Armenians prevailed. If denialist myths in Turkey acknowledge the deaths of the Ottoman Armenians, they justify such deaths as “retaliation” for the deaths of Turkish Muslims during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 or equate the massacres of Armenians with Turkish casualties of war from the same period. For instance, Talat Paşa, the mastermind behind the deportations and massacres of roughly one million Armenians in 1915-16, argues in his memoirs that an equal number of Turks were killed by Armenians during World War I and in its aftermath (51-56).

Type
correspondents at large
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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

Works Cited

Adak, Hülya. “Introduction: Exiles at Home—Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 1, 2008, pp. 2026.Google Scholar
Balakian, Grigoris. Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918. Translated by Balakian, Peter with Sevag, Aris, Vintage, 2009.Google Scholar
Biberyan, Zaven. Babam Aşkale'ye Gitmedi. Aras, 2000.Google Scholar
Çetin, Fethiye. Anneannem. Metis, 2004.Google Scholar
Ertürk, Nergis. “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar's Hasret, Benjamin's Melancholy.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 1, 2008, pp. 4156.Google Scholar
Guillory, John. “The Common Core and the Evasion of Curriculum.” PMLA, vol. 130, no. 3, 2015, pp. 666–72.Google Scholar
Khanjian, Arsinee. “Ararat: Time, Film and History.” Workshop on Armenian Turkish Scholarship, 3 Oct. 2015, Sabancı U, Istanbul.Google Scholar
Kırkyasaryan, Manuel. “M.K.” Adlı Çocugun Tehcir Anıları: 1915 ve Sonrası. edited by Baskin, Oran, İletişim, 2005.Google Scholar
Parla, Jale. “The Wounded Tongue: Turkey's Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 1, 2008, pp. 2740.Google Scholar
Paşa, Talat. Talat Paşaʿnın Hatıraları. Güven, 1946.Google Scholar
Yaeger, Patricia. “Editor's Column: My Name Is Blue—a Map of Ottoman Baghdad.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 1, 2008, pp. 919.Google Scholar