Dispossession and Its Legacies: Comparisons, Intersections, and Connections | Panel 2

Recorded on February 10 and 11, 2022. Opening Remarks: Helen Makhdoumian, University of Michigan Jacob Caponi, University of Michigan and Fatma Müge Göçek, University of Michigan, “How Difficult Pasts Complicate the Present: Comparative Analysis of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda” Elyse Semerdjian, Whitman College, “If These Bones Could Speak: The Genesis of Armenian Pilgrimage to Dayr al-Zur” Claire Baytas, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, “Patterns of Marginalization in Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s Waiting for the Clouds” Helen Makhdoumian, University of Michigan, “When the Study of ‘Settler Mnemonics’ Meets the Study of Literature” Discussant: Dirk Moses, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill This workshop focuses on the historical instances and aesthetic representations of dispossession, its violence, and its persisting legacies in the former Ottoman Empire and its diasporas. The organizers hope to bring Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and Armenian studies into conversation with settler colonial studies, critical Indigenous studies, and global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Invoking dispossession as a point of comparison and the framework for the discussion, the workshop joins recent work in Armenian studies and Ottoman studies, which has begun to explore chains of displacement and dispossession under conditions of what some have called internal colonization (Üngör and Polatel; Bloxham). The aim is to put these works into conversation with the distinct yet inseparable fields of settler colonial and Indigenous studies, and ask how they might inform, learn from, and complicate understandings of territorial removal, the settler/native binary, and Indigenous transnationalisms. The second panel, “Memory, Narrative, and Aesthetic Form,” takes up representations of dispossession and its legacies, with a focus on film, literature, and testimony. It features analyses of a film on the silences of a Greek Orthodox woman dispossessed from the Black Sea region in 1916, of settlement and state memory work in an Armenian American and American Indian novel, and of lived memory practices pertaining to the 1915 Armenian and 1994 Rwandan genocides.