Books by Elyse Semerdjian
More to Lose trans. Kareem Abu Zeid (New York: NYRB Press, 2014), 16. Ilan Pappé notes that even ... more More to Lose trans. Kareem Abu Zeid (New York: NYRB Press, 2014), 16. Ilan Pappé notes that even Palestinians have refrained from the term "ethnic cleansing," opting for the term Nakba ("catastrophe") while Zionists used the term "cleansing" to describe their operations in 1948. See The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: One World, 2007) and Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. 2 The private speech was transcribed by Wilhelm Canaris on 22 August 1939. See Kevork Bardakjian, Hitler and the Armenian Genocide-Special Report No. 3 (Toronto: The Zoryan Institute, 1985). 3 "Operation Protective Edge" was also referred to as the "Battle of the Withered Grain."
Stanford University Press, 2023
Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian ... more 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.
Reviews of "Off the Straight Path" by Elyse Semerdjian
New Perspectives on Turkey
(Online publication January 24 2011)
Bulletin of The School of Oriental and African Studies-university of London, 2009
Papers by Elyse Semerdjian
Journal of Genocide Research, 2024
Less spectacular than industrial mass killing, starvation and extreme depravation are effective a... more Less spectacular than industrial mass killing, starvation and extreme depravation are effective and largely forgotten weapons of genocidal warfare. The quiet nature of this weapon seeks to obscure the role of the perpetrator in pulling the trigger. This essay reintroduces the concept of genocide by attrition originally introduced by Raphael Lemkin and later developed by Helen Fein and its uses in Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh (ANK) and Gaza. Intentional extreme deprivation of entire populations is not incidental to genocidal warfare but part of its design. The carceral conditions produced by the “slow violence” of Israel’s 2006 enclosure of the Gaza Strip were hastened after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. Gazafication fractures land and territory several times over through the creation of physical and digital checkpoints, “safe zones,” border inspections, and securitization of humanitarian aid designed to make life suffocatingly unlivable. Similarly, when food, fuel, and medical supplies were blocked from entering ANK from the Lachin Corridor in December 2022, after 9 months of siege, the indigenous Armenian population of the enclave chose mass exodus over death by starvation. Such instances of ethnic cleansing are designed to appear voluntary or, alternatively, look like natural disasters to obscure the role of the perpetrator. In Gaza and ANK, Gazafication has been used as an instrument of genocide by attrition.
Religion and Urbanity Online, 2024
Journal of Genocide Research, 2024
Mary Kaldor claimed that before World War II one civilian died for every eight combatants, that f... more Mary Kaldor claimed that before World War II one civilian died for every eight combatants, that figure inversed with eight civilians dying for every soldier afterward. 1 Kaldor's averages are only slightly different in the post-9/11 era of "humane war" where civilians now comprise 90 per cent of wartime casualties. 2 In an attempt to justify illegal acts of collective punishment and targeted assassinations, states have declared civilians "collateral damage" (acceptable casualties) and "human shields" (permissible targets). Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini have systematically documented how blurring the distinction between combatant and non-combatant has served states that seek to efface protections civilians are afforded under the Fourth Geneva Convention. 3 In Gaza, as conflict zones in Syria and Chechnya, civilians are declared "human shields" even while they attempt to flee areas for safety or live inside "safe zones." These new norms of genocidal warfare are an ominous portent for a posthuman future in which entire populations are no longer categorized civilian. After the 7 October Hamas attack, in which 1,139 people were murdered-among them 695 civilians, thirty six children, 373 Israeli security personnel, and seventy one foreigners-Palestinians were collectively blamed. 4 Israeli President Isaac Herzog declared at a 13 October press conference, "It's an entire nation that is out there that's responsible," blaming the civilian population for not rising up against Hamas. 5 UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently called Gaza "a graveyard for children"a foreseeable outcome when indiscriminate bombs meet one of the most densely populated places on earth where half the population is under age eighteen.
Historical Studies in Natural Sciences, 2023
My grandmother Hripsimae, a child survivor of the Armenian Genocide, never shared the story of ho... more My grandmother Hripsimae, a child survivor of the Armenian Genocide, never shared the story of how she ended up in Aleppo. Perhaps she couldn't remember her own expulsion from her homeland or even the murder and disappearance of her conscripted father. As with other victims of mass violence, there was silence around the past. When I began to research the affective and embodied experiences of Armenian Genocide survivors, I combed the archives for traces of my grandmother. 1 Instead I found traces of others who communicate what my grandmother was unable to say. Under a pile of paper cadavers, I find a still-breathing twelve-year-old girl. 2 During the genocidal campaign conducted by the Ottoman Empire under the cover of World War I, Mariam, a toddler, was deported with her family, abducted with her mother from a caravan of deportees, and sold for twenty pounds by a slave dealer to an Arab. Nine years later, she was rescued but could not remember her own surname. 3 The League of Nations archives in Geneva holds nearly 2,000 intake records of victims who fled to the Aleppo Rescue Home run by Danish humanitarian
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), 2022
The affective horrors of the Armenian Genocide leave traces upon the living. Most pilgrims who v... more The affective horrors of the Armenian Genocide leave traces upon the living. Most pilgrims who visit sites of mass killing in contemporary Syria and Turkey note that they feel a profound sense of sadness and are overcome with tears of mourning while visiting the sites. This essay explores these experiences along with cases of visitors who had an altogether different experience of the uncanny including physical ailment. I suggest that some who visit spaces where Armenian Genocide atrocities were committed a century ago are unsettled temporally, geographically, and bodily because they are visitors to haunted spaces or what Roma Sendayka has called “non-sites of memory.” How do communal memories of horrific bodily violence sometimes result in embodied hauntings? How have visitors historically enacted rituals—including collecting bones of martyrs— in an attempt to vacate the affective necrogeography of ghosts by naming the unnamed dead?
Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, 2021
Zabel Essayan's incisive report, "The Liberation of non-Muslim Women and Children in Turkey" (191... more Zabel Essayan's incisive report, "The Liberation of non-Muslim Women and Children in Turkey" (1919), documents how the Ottoman government and its proxies targeted women and children with specific forms of genocidal violence. Written in the immediate aftermath from a position of exile, the report is translated in its entirety into English and interpreted for its value to recent developments in gender and genocide studies. While the report has been discussed by scholars as a document of witness, rarely has Zabel's writing been examined in depth for its analysis of specific forms of sexual atrocity central to genocidal design nor as an explicitly feminist text that calls for Armenian women to assume a central role in the postwar recuperation effort.
Houshamadyan, 2020
New article about Karen Jeppe, the Danish relief worker, genocide witness, teacher, League of Nat... more New article about Karen Jeppe, the Danish relief worker, genocide witness, teacher, League of Nations commissioner, etc. The article is found in three versions (English, Armenian, and Turkish) and contains lots of new archival material, insights, photos, etc.
https://www.houshamadyan.org/en/mapottomanempire/vilayetaleppo/sandjak-of-aleppo/religion/missionaries.html
https://www.houshamadyan.org/arm/mapottomanempire/vilayetaleppo/sandjakofaleppo/religion/missionaries.html
https://www.houshamadyan.org/tur/haritalar/halep-vilayeti/halep-sancagi/din/misyonerler.html?utm_campaign=Houshamadyannewsletter5I97&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Houshamadyancontacts
10 August 2020
Aleppo and Its Hinterland in the Ottoman Period / Alep et sa province à l'époque ottomane, eds. Stefan Winter and Mafalde Ade (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2019). , 2019
This chapter examines the history of Judayda Quarter, a district of Aleppo produced by both Musli... more This chapter examines the history of Judayda Quarter, a district of Aleppo produced by both Muslim and Christian endowments. Using Arabic, Armenian, and Ottoman Turkish sources, the paper examines the particular role that early modern Armenian immigration played in the development of the quarter's Armenian institution starting in the fifteenth century.
Human Remains and Violence, 2018
This article discusses how Armenians have collected, displayed and exchanged the bones of their m... more This article discusses how Armenians have collected, displayed and exchanged the bones of their murdered ancestors in formal and informal ceremonies of remembrance in Dayr al-Zur, Syria – the nal destination for hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the deportations of 1915. These pilgrimages – replete with overlapping secular and nationalist motifs – are a modern variant of historical pilgrimage practices; yet these bones are more than relics. Bone rituals, displays and vernacular memorials are enacted in spaces of memory that lie outside of ocial state memorials, making unmarked sites of atrocity more legible. Vernacular memorial practices are of particular interest as we consider new archives for the history of the Armenian Genocide. The rehabilitation of this historical site into public consciousness is particularly urgent, since the Armenian Genocide Memorial Museum and Martyr's Church at the centre of the pilgrimage site were both destroyed by ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) in 2014.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2013
In the 18th century, non-Muslims and women crossed social boundaries during a period of increased... more In the 18th century, non-Muslims and women crossed social boundaries during a period of increased global consumption, prompting intervention on the part of Ottoman officials. On the imperial level, the sultan promulgated edicts to restrict such crossings, following the path of earlier laws that had regulated public spaces including bathhouses. In Aleppo, a local reflection of these 18th-century trends was increased monitoring of nudity and of contact between Muslims and non-Muslims within the city's bathhouses. Regulations required that bathkeepers provide separate bath sundries for Muslims and non-Muslims and prohibited co-confessional bathing for women in particular. With the assistance of guilds-and to a lesser extent millet representativescomplex bathing schedules for Muslim and non-Muslim women were registered at court to support segregation policies. Jurists discussing modesty requirements for Muslim women declared that non-Muslim (dhimmī) women were to be treated as unrelated men in that they were forbidden to gaze upon a naked Muslim woman. Shari a court rulings were constructed along similar lines, indicating that the dhimmī woman was an unstable, liminal social category because in some circumstances her gaze was gendered male. Muslim male elites and local guilds ultimately instituted segregated bathing schedules to protect the purity of Muslim women from the danger posed by the dhimmī female figure.
to cross into Syria perhaps to tip the balance against recent Asad gains in the south. However, m... more to cross into Syria perhaps to tip the balance against recent Asad gains in the south. However, many Armenians, including the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) and subsequent Armenian activists quickly linked Turkey's role in Kessab three weeks ago to the 1915 Armenian Genocide-an event commemorated later this month on 24 April. While dismissed by the opposition, Armenian fears are not completely baseless. Some Islamist opposition militias carry their own unique brand of takfiri sectarianism evidenced by videoed beheadings and forced conversions of Shiites and Christians. Events like the depopulation of Kessab do little to assuage Armenian fears of annihilation that remain alive after a century. Although guerilla groups are often in conflict with one another, they have in common attacks Christian villages, conversion of churches into militia headquarters as in Raqqa, desecration and looting of religious objects, kidnapping and forcibly converting Christians to Islam, and summarily executing minorities and even fellow Sunni Muslim fighters by mistake in the streets. Yet, aside from the removal of a cross from a church rooftop, there was no mass destruction in Kessab when it was captured.
A B S T R A C T This article examines the legal bargaining of Armenian women in the dual Armenian... more A B S T R A C T This article examines the legal bargaining of Armenian women in the dual Armenian and Islamic legal system in Aleppo. This study based on twenty-two cases of Armenian conversion to Islam informs how conversion, while rare, affected women who found themselves suddenly married to Muslim men and mothers of Muslim children. The archives document women who appeared in the sharia court seeking either to remain tied to their religious communities by resisting conversion or to escape unwanted marriages through conversion to Islam. Particular to Aleppo's courts were Armenian women's requests for Christian burial rites. This study shows that in some cases the sharia courts offered those converted women a legal option for divorce that was absent in Armenian canon law. The products of these conversions were hybrid Armenian-Muslim families, which challenge the often static presentation of Armenian identity.
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Books by Elyse Semerdjian
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.
Reviews of "Off the Straight Path" by Elyse Semerdjian
Papers by Elyse Semerdjian
https://www.houshamadyan.org/en/mapottomanempire/vilayetaleppo/sandjak-of-aleppo/religion/missionaries.html
https://www.houshamadyan.org/arm/mapottomanempire/vilayetaleppo/sandjakofaleppo/religion/missionaries.html
https://www.houshamadyan.org/tur/haritalar/halep-vilayeti/halep-sancagi/din/misyonerler.html?utm_campaign=Houshamadyannewsletter5I97&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Houshamadyancontacts
10 August 2020
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.
https://www.houshamadyan.org/en/mapottomanempire/vilayetaleppo/sandjak-of-aleppo/religion/missionaries.html
https://www.houshamadyan.org/arm/mapottomanempire/vilayetaleppo/sandjakofaleppo/religion/missionaries.html
https://www.houshamadyan.org/tur/haritalar/halep-vilayeti/halep-sancagi/din/misyonerler.html?utm_campaign=Houshamadyannewsletter5I97&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Houshamadyancontacts
10 August 2020