Repetition and Uncanny Temporalities: Armenians and the Recurrence of Genocide in the Levant

TY - JOUR

T1 - Repetition and Uncanny Temporalities

T2 - Armenians and the Recurrence of Genocide in the Levant

AU - Bandak, Andreas

PY - 2019/3/15

Y1 - 2019/3/15

N2 - This paper presents a meditation on how memory and repetition are played out when experienced as both a historical event and an ongoing and returning possibility. Amongst the Armenian community in Lebanon repetition takes on a particular salience in the form of a haunting from the foundational genocide of 1915, a genocide that in recent years has been brought back with the events in Syria where family and kin have faced severe hardships, random killings, and destruction of entire villages. In this paper I over various fieldworks in Lebanon return to the incident of the cleansing of Kessab, an important Armenian village in Syria, and how such an event in today’s Syria points to past, present, and future forms of haunting but also the reconfiguration of affect. The same event draws different landscapes of the imagination, landscapes of fear, haunting, return, but also of resilience and responsibility in the meeting with the time to come.

AB - This paper presents a meditation on how memory and repetition are played out when experienced as both a historical event and an ongoing and returning possibility. Amongst the Armenian community in Lebanon repetition takes on a particular salience in the form of a haunting from the foundational genocide of 1915, a genocide that in recent years has been brought back with the events in Syria where family and kin have faced severe hardships, random killings, and destruction of entire villages. In this paper I over various fieldworks in Lebanon return to the incident of the cleansing of Kessab, an important Armenian village in Syria, and how such an event in today’s Syria points to past, present, and future forms of haunting but also the reconfiguration of affect. The same event draws different landscapes of the imagination, landscapes of fear, haunting, return, but also of resilience and responsibility in the meeting with the time to come.

U2 - 10.1080/02757206.2018.1528245

DO - 10.1080/02757206.2018.1528245

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0275-7206

VL - 30

SP - 190

EP - 211

JO - History and Anthropology

JF - History and Anthropology

IS - 2

ER -