by David J. Lobina
There are some very long journal articles and books in analytical philosophy, and whilst I’m sometimes unsure as to the need for very big books in certain cases, I am a fan of long philosophical papers. Some of the best articles in analytical philosophy are long, very well argued, thorough, and pretty exhaustive – indeed, I’ve rarely thought ‘this topic deserves a full-length book’ after reading some of these pieces, and this always seemed like a good thing to me. I was reminded of this recently when a philosopher stated in their social media account that many books in politics, history or culture would be better as long pieces in the style and rigour of analytical philosophy papers, and even though the remark may have been a bit tongue-in-cheek, the point is a valid one.
I think this is true for the book under review here, Al-Rustom’s Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide, in fact; not that long a book (the actual text is 224 pages, with an additional 40 pages of substantial endnotes), but one that is surprisingly repetitive and where the main argument would have benefited from a more constrained but focused format.
Enduring Erasures is a work in anthropology and ethnography, though it employs much of the style and theoretical framework of cultural/social studies, as I shall show later. It is nominally focused on the fate of the Armenians in Turkey since the Armenian Genocide, which is to say that it is mostly concerned with Western Armenians (those who lived in Anatolia before the foundation of Turkey) and not much with Eastern Armenians (those from the Armenian Highlands, this area eventually becoming the current Republic of Armenia). But the book does touch upon various other topics and more space is devoted to the Armenian diaspora in France than to the Armenians who stayed behind in Turkey. Complicating matters somewhat, there is a great number of so-called Hidden Armenians, or crypto-Armenians, in Turkey, and these are Armenians who conceal their origins (the estimates vary widely, ranging from tens of thousands of people to single-digit millions).
The book is composed of 6 main chapters, fronted by a preface and an Introduction, and back ended by an epilogue. The Introduction is the longest chapter by a wide margin, and is meant to provide the framework for the analysis. In this chapter, the concept of ‘denativization’ is introduced (very roughly, the erasure of a people’s identity; see more infra), which works as the foundational running thread in the overall book, along with other important principles such as ‘survivance’ (borrowed from Native American studies from the US and meant to be a combination of survival and resistance, though the original sources are equivocal about this), ‘otherness’, ‘racialisation’, and ‘confessional belonging’ (the latter as one definitional principle of Armenian identity). As stated in the introduction, the book aims to tell Armenian experiences of displacement, erasures, and survivance, taking post-First World War diplomacy and the 2007 assassination of Hrank Dink (a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist and activist) as starting points (p. 41).
Chapter 1 describes some of the background to the foundation of Turkey vis-à-vis the Armenians, who were soon racialised as infidels, including the generally discriminatory and dehumanising policies that Armenians suffer in Turkey to this day, with a significant section devoted to Dink’s activities. Chapter 2 tracks the events from the genocide up to the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, resulting in the foundation of Turkey as a modern nation-state and establishing the minority status of Armenians, the attempt to erasure their past in Anatolia, and the specific ideal of a Turk according to Turkish nationalism (basically, a Sunni Muslim).
Chapter 3 constitutes a departure of sorts, as it centres on the personal narratives of 3 Armenians, in contrast to the public-figure accounts involving Dink from chapters 1 and 2. This is one of the strongest chapters and offers a different but more direct account of the sort of hardships Armenians have encountered, both in Turkey and overseas, and we are provided with relevant information regarding the fate of now lost Armenian villages in Turkey (some reconverted into Turkish and Muslim villages). The chapter is rather short, however, and the third personal account, in particular, especially so.
Chapter 4 treats the resettling of Armenians after the genocide in two locales, Istanbul and France; much is made of schooling initiatives to keep Armenian culture and language going in Istanbul (with a side issue involving the formation of clergy within the Armenian Church) and of the problems of assimilation for Armenians in France, though the main focus of the chapter falls upon the argument that in neither population there remains a personal connection to Armenian villages in Anatolia prior to the formation of Turkey, raising the issue of authenticity (p. 185). This very issue receives a wider airing in Chapter 5, another strong chapter in the book, where the assimilation of Armenians in France within a French social and political context is discussed extensively, the overall conclusion much as that advanced in the preceding chapters – namely, that there is a denativization of Armenianess as it pertains to their roots in Anatolia, given that the Armenian identity so developed in France is based on the recognition of the genocide, the ability to speak Armenian, and loyalty to the Republic of Armenia (Eastern Armenia), with no reference to the origins of the many emigrated families in Anatolia. Chapter 6, relatedly, is devoted to the importance of the Armenian historic homelands in Anatolia for the question of what it means to be Armenian; Dink makes another appearance here, this time as support for the claim that there is a historical continuity between modern Armenians and ancient Armenian civilisations in Anatolia – and therein, or thereabouts, lies an authentic understanding of Armenianess.
Thus the book, and forth to the evaluation now. As mentioned, the book is rather repetitive at times, with the same point made in various chapters, but without additional evidence or a new perspective to warrant the restatement. The book is also slightly parochial from a theoretical point of view; this is especially true in the Introduction, where there’s a significant amount of technical jargon from the literature (racialisation, otherness, etc.), but whose use is rarely cashed out (I’ll come back to denativization to make this point properly). What’s more, the book contains a great number of sporadic references to different ways to frame some issues from a variety of scholars (e.g., Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt), which are fleetingly introduced as to better anchor the discussion, but which in the end are not employed much at all – they come and go (this is the case for Paul Gilroy’s distinction between roots and routes, mentioned on page 159, which I found potentially insightful, but is never used properly). In this sense alone, the book makes a fair number of points and claims as it proceeds, but there is little cohesion overall.
The case of denativization, the book’s underlying theme, is the clearest example of a framing that does not earn its keep, for it is set up to do too much work. It is introduced as an alternative to focusing on the Genocide as a frame for what Armenians have gone and are going through, and with the aim to concentrate on the process according to which Armenians were turned into a foreign minority by Turkish nationalism (pp. 13-15). But the preference seems to stem, in part, from the refusal of taking the Armenian Genocide as a starting point; denativization is seen as a process to erase the connection between Armenia and Anatolia, as acting on the afterlives of the Genocide (p. 30).
I think there are two issues worth noting here. Firstly, the process described in the book is not particular to Armenians in Turkey, with or without a genocide; in fact it is typical of nationalism and the advent of nation-states, a modern phenomenon that has always resulted in dominant and non-dominant groups within a specific region, and in various homogenising processes to subvert subgroups into the dominant group. In addition, the Armenian case is entirely compatible with a less narrow understanding of the term genocide; as this long overview of how the 1948 Genocide Convention came about shows, the idea of ‘cultural genocide’ was central to the drafting history of the Convention, even if it wasn’t formally adopted, and there is nothing barring such a concept being applied to the Armenians – a cultural genocide is precisely what seems to also have happened to them.
Secondly, even though the book states that the concept of denativization does not presuppose anything about Armenia and Armenianess per se, and it is instead meant to critique the Turkish state own invention of the Turks as native to the land, with precedence over Armenians (p. 19), this is not quite what we find. Such perspective is meant to work as a counter-history to Turkish nationalism, but in the event the framework is overstretched. This is clearest in chapter 5, which discusses the integration Armenians undertook in France, a case of assimilating into French culture (much is made of France’s apparent obsession with the process of homogeneity), but which the book claims is also a case of denativization for Armenians. In the words of the author: ‘…the nativization of Armenians in France has worked in tandem with denativizing them from their Armenian homeland’ (p. 173), resulting in a distinction between Armenians in Anatolia and those in diaspora, and also between Armenians from western and eastern Armenia (the Republic of Armenia receives rather little discussion in the book, as alluded to earlier).
This is a curious argumentative line to take, however, for it relies on a rather essentialist reading of what it means to be Armenian – namely, a connection to Anatolia – and though this is par the course for nationalism, this is an outlook the author tries to avoid in the book. The unfortunate result is that the book is forced to dismiss ideas around Armenianess that do not revolve around the connection to a land, as it happens here in the case of the Armenians in the French diaspora, as mentioned (recall the lack of authenticity). As I have written elsewhere (see here and here, and references therein), however, nationalism is a modern concept and national identities even more so; and a fortiori, national identities are very abstract and thus fluid, with any connections to a land or a distant past equally abstract if not artificial and often part of an invented past history (this is the case for any nationalism). It is not a little anachronistic to keep referring to Ottoman Armenians and Armenia, as the book does, and there really isn’t any causal and direct connection between modern peoples and people from hundreds of years ago who happened to have lived in the same area, let alone in terms of national identities, common cultures or common languages, all of which only became the norm very recently indeed.
Towards the end of the book, the author claims that Anatolia was the Armenian heartland for more than two millennia (p. 199) and this is supposed to centre the Armenian identity in 21st century France as well as anywhere else. There is also a bit more essentialism on display a few pages later when we encounter an Armenian who is clearly a native speaker of Turkish but who regards Armenian as his mother tongue, the implication being that there is a connection between a language and an ethnicity or a people (p. 207). This is a lapse into (nationalist) ideology when what we need is a more robust theoretical outlook, and unfortunately the concept of denativization as understood in the book cannot provide that.
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There is much more to the book that was interesting to me and indeed useful, which I haven’t discussed here at all but it is worth keeping in mind (the issues around confessional belonging, the role of Islam in manufacturing the ideal Turk, and much else), but all that is possible to find in better books (or, instead, in historical accounts). As a way to end this piece, though, I would like to circle back to the point I made at the beginning; namely, that what this study needed was the straightjacket of a journal in analytical philosophy in order to do a better job of conceptualising the denativization framework – and all that would derive therefrom. Not that any of this has any effect on the grave injustices the Armenian people have suffered and continue to suffer, of course.
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