About the Book
Recovering Armenia offers the first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Armenians who remained in Turkey. Following World War I, as the victorious Allied powers occupied Ottoman territories, Armenian survivors returned to their hometowns optimistic that they might establish an independent Armenia. But Turkish resistance prevailed, and by 1923 the Allies withdrew, the Turkish Republic was established, and Armenians were left again to reconstruct their communities within a country that still considered them traitors. Lerna Ekmekcioglu investigates how Armenians recovered their identity within these drastically changing political conditions.
Reading Armenian texts and images produced in Istanbul from the close of WWI through the early 1930s, Ekmekcioglu gives voice to the community's most prominent public figures, notably Hayganush Mark, a renowned activist, feminist, and editor of the influential journal Hay Gin. These public figures articulated an Armenianess sustained through gendered differences, and women came to play a central role preserving traditions, memory, and the mother tongue within the home. But even as women were being celebrated for their traditional roles, a strong feminist movement found opportunity for leadership within the community. Ultimately, the book explores this paradox: how someone could be an Armenian and a feminist in post-genocide Turkey when, through its various laws and regulations, the key path for Armenians to maintain their identity was through traditionally gendered roles.
Table of Contents:
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Afterlife of Armenians in Post-Genocide Turkey, an Introduction chapter abstractThe introduction introduces the protagonist of the story, Hayganush Mark, the Constantinopolitan Armenian woman who published the main primary source of the book, Hay Gin (Armenian Woman), a feminist biweekly, from 1919 to 1933 in Istanbul. The chapter clarifies the research questions that drove the writing of this book and explains what kind of a route was taken to answer them. The analytical core of the chapter revolves around the historical explanation of why and how a gendered way of organizing social relations was fundamental for Armenians as they adjusted to the multiple catastrophes that befell them from the World War I into the mid-1930s.
1The Re-Birth of a Nation chapter abstractThe story takes place in Allies' occupied Constantinople from late 1918 to late 1922. During this time Armenian leadership aimed to cede territory from the defeated Ottoman Empire and declare independence. Their goal was to unite the Eastern and Western parts of the Armenian ancestral lands. The chapter looks at the ways in which this goal was enmeshed with a broader agenda called National Revival or Restoration. Post-genocide Armenians mobilized to prove "the Turk" wrong and exist as a community, as a nation, and as a state. They have imagined these agendas in familial and gendered terms whereby children, most of them orphaned, represented the future.
2Can Feminists Revive a Nation? chapter abstractArmenians of Constantinople experienced the war years different from their counterparts in other parts of the Empire. They were not massacred or deported en masse. Therefore in the aftermath of the war, they were the ones who helped the survivors through various relief organizations. Elite, intellectual women of the Ottoman capital were very active in these endeavors and they also contributed to all other kinds of National Revival-related causes, such as fundraising, lobbying, and propaganda. In return, they asked to have a say in the decision making bodies of their community. This chapter focuses on the ways in which feminists formulated their arguments for the inseparability of the women's cause from the national cause. They established a Women's Association and began publishing a feminist fortnightly called Hay Gin (Armenian Woman)
3An Exodus and its Aftermath chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on one single year, from late 1922 to late 1923 when it became obvious that Armenians failed in their territorial goals. As a result of the Turkish War of Independence which was led by Mustafa Kemal, Ottoman Muslims drew the occupation forces out and forced the Allies to renegotiate a peace treaty. In the fall of 1922, after the Symrna Catastrophe (Kemalist takeover of Western Anatolia from occupying Greeks), Armenians (and Greeks) in Constantinople fled the city in panic, in anticipation of Kemalist entry to the city which could unleash violence against Christians whom Kemalists and the Muslim majority accused of collaboration with the enemy. Most people that we encountered in the first and second chapters of the book leave the city during this time. The remaining become an officially recognized minority in Turkey according to the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne.
4A Tamed Minority chapter abstractThe chapter looks at the communal survival strategies that Turkish Armenians crafted in order to stay put and remain safe in a place where they were unwanted by the state and by the majority. Armenians performed loyalty to the state and in returned hoped to receive freedom of religion and traditions. This formulation was gendered. Because women represented and were seen as the transmitters of tradition, they were assigned the task of ensuring the continuation of Armenianness in Turkey. The ways in which Armenians adapted to the new Turkey's conditions rested on an age-old relationship between the Ottoman state and its non-Muslims (dhimmis). But Turkey was very different from the former Empire, especially after the secularization and westernization reforms that the Kemalist Republic passed in the 1920s and 30s. Armenians welcomed these developments. This new-but-old state-minority relationship is termed "secular dhimmitude," a consciously paradoxical term.
5Can Armenian Feminism Survive the new Turkey? chapter abstractThe ways in which the Turkish state discriminated against Armenians and the legacies of the recent, violent past, pushed the community into an enclave-like existence. As Armenians turned in on themselves they cherished domesticity, conservatism, and status quo. The chapter follows the Hay Gin journal to see how both the nationalist and feminist discourses changed in its pages. Because the editor of the journal, unlike most of her peers, did not leave Turkey, her case provides an emblematic case of what Armenians had to do in order to survive the new Turkey. Feminists were faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, they wanted to continue the Armenian tradition. On the other hand, their liberal progressive ideas that demanded gender equality required a change in the hierarchical order of the community. The chapter analyzes how Hayganush Mark, Hay Gin's editor tried to resolve these challenges.
Conclusion: When History Became Destiny, a Conclusion chapter abstractThe chapter summarizes main points of the book. It briefly discusses its interventions into the historiography. The last part narrates how young Armenian women in early 2000s Istanbul resurged an interest in the history of Turkish Armenian feminism.
About the Author :
Lerna Ekmekcioglu is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Review :
"Lerna Ekmekcioglu's radically revealing and provocative book challenges conventional historical wisdom in its exploration of the continued existence of an Armenian minority in modern Turkey. Her passionate, yet careful analysis of gender and nation demonstrates the central — and paradoxical — role of women and gender politics in both creating and foreclosing possibilities for Armenian identity, gender equality, and co-existence in post-genocide Turkey."—Atina Grossmann, The Cooper Union "With verve, passion and wit, Ekmekcioglu shows how central women were to the restoration of the Armenian community in the decade after the genocidal war. Recovering Armenia is a must-read for all students of the Great War and its aftermath, and for anyone who wants to understand the modern Middle East and the roots of sectarian conflict that continues in the region today."—Elizabeth Thompson, University of Virginia "This remarkably innovative history offers two indispensable analytical narratives. It crafts the first thorough account of the ways in which, between 1918 and 1933, Armenian survivors of the genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey inventively reconstituted themselves as a harshly constrained yet enduring national minority within the new Turkish Republic. Second, it offers an often inspiring account of how, within this officially second-class community whose necessarily gendered behavioral repertoire made women second-class members of that community, feminists nevertheless found new ways simultaneously to be an Armenian feminist subject of the Turkish nation-state and for the Armenian ethnonation. A pioneering work that will prove indispensable."—Khachig Tölölyan, Wesleyan University "The impacts of genocide generate shock waves, altering lives for generations to come. This excellent book illuminates the hitherto unstudied aftermath of the Armenian Genocide as negotiated by those few who remained in the Turkish Republic. A must-read for anyone interested in the effects of collective violence."—Fatma Müge Göçek, University of Michigan, author of Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians " ... people will surely turn to Ekmekçiolu's book to learn about an important but long-neglected aspect of this tumultuous period and the remarkable women who tried to push their society and city in an enlightened and progressive direction."—Resat Kaaba, Journal of Levantine Studies "Ekmekçioğlu's pioneering book opens up a number of important fields that await examination by later generations of scholars. Among them, I will point out one of the most critical: intercommunal relations, especially the struggles of feminists against conservative power holders in the community...As Ekmekçioğlu exhaustively demonstrates, the Armenian press of the period remains an invaluable source for understanding the extent of this dimension and the remarkable power of Armenian feminism in a critical era of Armenian history."—Yasar T. Cora, H-Nationalism "This ground-breaking book by Lerna Ekmekiolu should be regarded as a substantial contribution to the literature on post-genocide Armenian women's identity...overall a solid work that sheds new light on the history of Turkified Armenians, of feminist activism mainly in the decade after the Armenian genocide and the connection between feminism and nationalism. The book should stimulate debate within the scholarly community on Armenian history and gender studies, while also serving as an important basis for further research on these topics."—Eldad Ben-Aharon, Patterns of Prejudice
