Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-356) and index.
Contents:
Zabel's pen : gender, body snatching, and the Armenian Genocide -- Weaponizing shame : dis-memberment of the Armenian collective body -- Rescuing "kittens" in the desert : the Armenian humanitarian relief effort -- Recovering survivors in Aleppo, replanting bodies in Syria's Armenian colonies -- Changelings and halflings : finding the Armenian buried inside the Islamized child -- Aurora's body, humanitarianism, and the pornography of suffering -- What lies beneath grandma's tattoos? : traumatic memories of inked skin -- Wounded whiteness : branded captives from the Old West to the Ottoman East -- Removing the "brand of shame," rehabilitating Armenian skin -- Counternarratives of tribal tattoos and survivor agency -- If these bones could speak : early Armenian pilgrimages to Dayr al-Zur -- Feeling their way through the desert : affective itineraries of "non-sites of memory" -- Bone memory : community, ritual, and memory work in the Syrian desert -- Epilogue : bone on bone.
Summary:
"A groundbreaking and profoundly moving exploration of the Armenian genocide, told through the traces left in the memories and on the bodies of its women survivors. Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or, alternatively, a national stain, and the bodies of women and children figured centrally within the Armenian communal memory and humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants, these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and--in what remains of those lives a century afterward--bones. With this book, Elyse Semerdjian offers a feminist reading of the Armenian Genocide. She explores how the Ottoman Armenian communal body was dis-membered, disfigured, and later re-membered by the survivor community. Gathering individual memories and archival fragments, she writes a deeply personal history, and issues a call to break open the archival record in order to embrace affect and memory. Traces of women and children rescued during and after the war are reconstructed to center the quietest voices in the historical record. This daring work embraces physical and archival remnants, the imprinted negatives of once living bodies, as a space of radical possibility within Armenian prosthetic memory and a necessary way to recognize the absence that remains"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.