From Natives to Foreigners: Enduring Erasures of Armenians in Turkey
This lecture introduces the concept of “denativization” to explore how Armenians in Turkey underwent this transformation. Denativization goes beyond human rights violations, addressing the systemic erasure of Armenian presence, identity, and history that continues long after the genocide, even as the vast Anatolian landscape has been emptied of Armenians. Through an examination of historical events, policies, and cultural shifts, this lecture illustrates how Armenians, once integral to the social and cultural fabric of Anatolia, were systematically marginalized and rendered alien in the land of their ancestors.
Denativization intervenes in historiography by challenging the genocide-centered framework that traditionally marks a definitive end to Armenian presence in Anatolia. Instead, it represents the afterlives of the Armenian genocide, showing that the erasure and marginalization of Armenians did not conclude with the genocide but persist through various forms of cultural and historical denial and revisionism. This approach shifts the narrative from a singular catastrophic event to a continuous process of erasure and survivance, highlighting the enduring impact of these historical injustices on the Armenian community. Through this lens, the lecture seeks to broaden the understanding of ethnic and cultural erasure, emphasizing the need for a more nuanced approach to addressing such historical injustices.
This lecture is organised by NIOD and the Turkey Studies Network.
About Hakem Al-Rustom
Hakem Al-Rustom is the Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History, and Assistant Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His work interrogates ruins of undocumented histories, ethnographic silences, and memory as methods for historical ethnographies in the aftermath of violence. He is the co-editor of Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press) and Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide (Columbia University Press), forthcoming in 2025.
Attendance is free.