Gendered silences, gendered memories: new memory work on Islamized Armenians in Turkey

Official URL: http://www.univie.ac.at/Geschichte/LHOMME/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=2&Itemid=16&lang=en

Since 2004, at least 18 books (across the genres of memoir, fiction, oral history, history, and historiography) have been published in the Turkish language on the Islamized Armenian survivors of the 1915 genocide and the (post)memories of their “Muslim” grandchildren. This emerging body of memory work poses significant challenges to Turkish national self-understanding, the official politics of genocide denial as well as to the growing scholarship on 1915. It also calls for a critical analysis of the nine decades of silence on Islamized Armenians in all historiographies. This article aims to discuss the need for a feminist perspective to make sense of both this silence and the recent process of unsilencing