Embattled Dreamlands. The Politics of Contesting Memory between Asia Minor and Karabakh
online ZOOM lecture by Dr. David Leupold | Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
Abstract On November 13, just three days after the end of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani Parliament's Committee on Regional Affairs introduced a bill "On Renaming the Village of Cakuri in the Xocavənd Region of Azerbaijan as the Village of Hünerli." The village, formerly inhabited by Armenians, with its Całkavank̔ monastery complex, located in Hadrut province in the southern part of Nagorno-Karabakh, is to be fitted into the reconfigured symbolic landscape of an ethnically homogeneous, Azerbaijani Karabakh by receiving an Azerbaijani place name. The renaming of place, river and mountain names plays a crucial role in consolidating one's own and contesting the other's national narrative. But the politics of memory has a long prehistory that stretches spatially across the Caucasus and Asia Minor (and arguably beyond) - and temporally from interethnic tensions in the late-Ottoman period to the Artsakh blockade of our days.
Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory (Routledge, 2020) seeks to explore this complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in a threefold-contested geography. Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space, it sheds light on the multi-layered memory landscapes of Armenia and Turkey, where collective violence stretches back from the Armenian Genocide to the Kurdish conflict of today. Based on his fieldwork in Turkey and Armenia, the author examines how states work to construct and monopolize collective memory by narrating, silencing, mapping and performing the past - and how similiar modes of weaponizing the past played out in the Second Karabakh War 2020.
For joining the webinar, please use this link: https://oeaw-ac-at.zoom.us/j/68039363365?pwd=MzBxZXNrYlFNeS9JcXN4NnE2cnV4QT09