Table of Contents for Remnants
1.Zabel's Pen: Gender, Body Snatching, and the Armenian Genocide
A close reading of a 1919 report written by Zabel Essayan underscores how sexual atrocity was a central feature of the Armenian Genocide. The structure of violence against Armenian women and children has its foundations in the Ottoman sex/gender system and is informed by patriarchy. The report centers not only women's victimhood but the central role women should play in rescuing and recuperating other women as a form of feminist political action.
2.Weaponizing Shame: Dis-memberment of the Armenian Collective Body
In genocide, women's bodies are severed from their community either through immediate annihilation or socially when captured bodies are condemned to "social death" and through assimilation forced to birth a new nation. The late Ottoman Empire secured biopolitical futures for Muslims while subjecting non-Muslims to necropolitical violence in the form of denuding, dragging, dismembering, burning, and publicly displaying corpses, which constituted a repertoire of genocide's body work.
3.Rescuing "Kittens" in the Desert: The Armenian Humanitarian Relief Effort
The voices of captive women and children held in Muslim homes can be found within a small trove of documents collected by rescuer Ruben Herian, who worked in coordination with regional prelacies to rescue thousands of women and children. The rescuers are named and documented in this chapter, Herian being one example among many. Among Herian's letters are appeals by globally dispersed family members and the rescuer's personal accounts of saving women and children being kept in Muslim homes in eastern Syria.
4.Recovering Survivors in Aleppo, Replanting Bodies in Syria's Armenian Colonies
For the Armenian community, a looming question was to which nation would Islamized Armenian women birth children: the Arabs, Kurds, Turks, or Armenians? How could Armenian women and girls be recuperated and rejoin the Armenian community? League of Nations commissioner Karen Jeppe established a Rescue Home in Aleppo where recovered Armenian women and children were reformed. Among her many ideas for reconstituting the Armenians was a project to plant displaced Armenians within colonies in rural Syria.
5."Changelings" and "Halflings": Finding the Armenian Buried inside the Islamized Child
The identities of rescued children would be determined within League Rescue Homes. The result was a biopolitical tug of war between the emerging Turkish state and the Armenian community to claim reproductive bodies needed to birth the nation—a struggle that played out in league-run homes. The stories of these children and the reclamation efforts from Aleppo to Baghdad illuminate the traumatic effects of forgetting and remembering one's Armenian identity after years of assimilation.
6.Aurora's Body, Humanitarianism, and the Pornography of Suffering
The story of survivor-turned-actress Aurora Mardiganian has been told many times. A feminist reading of her exploitation by Hollywood focuses on trauma and embodiment. Her memory quickly fell into oblivion after her brief rise to stardom in the postwar period. Aurora's resuscitation in the Armenian communal memory over the last few decades has been explored in the postmemory work of scholars and artists who seek to excavate her voice and her agency as witness.
7.What Lies beneath Grandma's Tattoos? Traumatic Memories of Inked Skin
In the years following their rescue, tattooed Armenian women attempted to make sense of their wounded skin marked with symbols belonging to a foreign culture. Descendants like filmmaker Suzanne Khardalian continue to grapple with the meaning of these tattoos. Some women, like the filmmaker's grandmother Khanum, lived with their marks in seeming silence; others, such as Khanum's sister Lucia, rationalized their tattoos in one way or another; still others, such as Aghavni Kabakian, sought to have their tattoos removed surgically to wipe clean the traumatic tattooing that indelibly marked her skin as a reminder of her ordeal.
8.Wounded Whiteness: Branded Captives from the Old West to the Ottoman East
Karen Jeppe's work in Aleppo linked the League of Nations concerns about white slavery—rooted in nineteenth-century white American captivity narratives and carnival performances—to the experiences of tattooed Armenian women in the Middle East. The racialization of tattoos, therefore, fed common assumptions that Armenian women were racially and morally corrupted by atavistic tattoos. These sensational stories of captivity, enslavement, and harem concubinage circulating in the media sparked a debate between Karen Jeppe and Turkish feminist Halide Edib.
9.Removing the "Brand of Shame," Rehabilitating Armenian Skin
Recuperation as wives and mothers within the Armenian community, essential for the future, would be made possible through science's rehabilitation of the skin. Medical journals and the popular press published stories by and about doctors who were experimenting with techniques to remove the stain of captivity from the skin of Armenian women. Some of the world's most prestigious dermatologists, drawing on innovations in surgical skin care for those "disfigured" by war, debated which surgical methods should be used to rescue these women imprisoned in their own skin.
10.Counternarratives of Tribal Tattoos and Survivor Agency
To the tribal communities that bore them, tattoos had the power to protect wearers from both metaphysical (evil spirits) and corporeal (Turkish soldiers) violence. The totemic symbols meant to protect appear to have done their work. But when some tattooed Armenian survivors were ostracized upon reentry into Armenian society, some relatives sought to ease their burden by reframing the tattoos as symbols of bravery. Dominant narratives of tattoos feminize and overdetermine tattoos as marks of sexual violence, especially when they ignore the tribal tattoos of boys and men.
11.If These Bones Could Speak: Early Armenian Pilgrimages to Dayr al-Zur
Considering the affective necrogeography of Dayr al-Zur, the killing fields during the Armenian Genocide, we move to the embodied work of pilgrims with the remains of Armenian martyrs. Tracing the earliest travels of Armenians to the site both during and after the genocide is a meditation on the work of the living with the dead. The power of bones prompts us to consider not only what we do with bones but what bones do to us.
12.Feeling Their Way through the Desert: Affective Itineraries of "Non-Sites of Memory"
The spaces where Armenians perished in the desert are full of both formal and informal sites of memory. Because the markers pilgrims use to engage in formal mourning practices are relatively new (and very few), the empty, neglected necrogeography demands witnesses fill the space affectively with the prosthetic memories passed down by ancestors—contemporary travelers and their experiences. These formal and informal spaces are documented as are uncanny experiences by pilgrims to the site.
13.Bone Memory: Community, Ritual, and Memory Work in the Syrian Desert
In the absence of care for unexcavated sites in the Syrian Desert, pilgrims create their own rituals to vacate the haunted space. These rituals include excavating the bones of martyrs that are sometimes reinterred or kept by pilgrims as relics. In oral interviews and writings of Armenian visitors, bones serve a mnemonic purpose for "bone memory." They are physical proof of the truth of 1915 but also perform the important work of reuniting the dead with the living remnants of the Armenian diaspora.