ABSTRACT
“Mnemonic Frontiers, Alien Homelands” introduces the reader to the main site of this research: the extended Lake Van region – a trilaterally contested geography located at the nexus where competing Turkish, Armenian and Kurdish national narratives collide. Against the homogenizing and mutually-exclusive nature of the national narrative, this chapter turns to the local space in search for counter-narratives that allow bridging of memory across the fault line that continues to divide those, whose descendants were expelled to present-day Armenia a century ago and those who today live in the Lake Van region in present-day Turkey. In order to retrace expelled and residing populations, the first part of this chapter provides a thorough reconstruction of the demographic structure of the region before and after 1915, as well as a meticulous localization of the descendants of the expelled populations (Armenian and Yezidi Kurds) in present-day Armenia. In order to provide a framework for the in-depth reconstruction of local counter-narratives in the subsequent chapter, the second part of this chapter engages in a profound discussion on memory and space. Two ways of conceptualizing the local space are proposed: “mnemonic frontier” and “alien homeland”. While the first suggests the existence of spatial factors that favor the emergence of counter-narratives (story-telling, moveable and immovable artefacts, rituals, linguistic landscapes), the latter proposes an understanding of the local space as both homeland and foreign land of the “disappeared other”.
