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

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalHistory and Anthropology
Volume30
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)190-211
Number of pages22
ISSN0275-7206
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

ID: 203415534