ABSTRACT
The conclusion emphasizes that this study aims to offer a more comprehensive and multifaceted view on the mutual interference of public and private memory by juxtaposing “officialized” narratives propagated through the politics of memory with challenging bottom-up narratives emerging from what is identified as a “mnemonic frontier”: the local space. Put together, this book offers a new perspective and new analytical framework for the study of collective memory in the threefold contested geography of Eastern Turkey/Western Armenia/Northern Kurdistan: it explores collective violence and forced population displacement as the essential precondition in the formation of demographically homogeneous nation-states and reconstructs the intertwined historical pathways of the Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish national movements, highlighting aspects of cooperation and conflict. It un-masks Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish “national history” as mirrored images of one another and reveals that while “national histories” are far from being self-evident and uncontested, states and state-like organizations are compelled to employ vast resources to reproduce their interpretation of the past by means of narrating, silencing, preforming and remapping. It introduces the extended Lake Van Region as an exemplary, trilaterally contested geography located at the very nexus of Turkish, Armenian and Kurdish national imaginaries and argues that factors ingrained in space such as story-telling, moveable and immovable artefacts, rituals and linguistic landscapes favor the emergence of counter-narratives. Ultimately, it offers an entirely novel approach to memory studies that highlights the multi-collective rooting of memory in collectives of genealogy, temporality, locality and ideology and their intrinsic potentiality to produce bridging patterns that can narrate the violent history of this contested geography beyond mutually-negating “ethno-centric interpretations”.
