I've written a couple of reviews of two fine books, Bedross Der Matossian's The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century and Khatchig Mouradian's The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and... more
I've written a couple of reviews of two fine books, Bedross Der Matossian's The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century and Khatchig Mouradian's The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918.
Actually, I wrote one review essay tracing some sort of arc in time, space, and human behavior from Adana before, during, and after the massacres of 1909 to the killing fields of Syria during and after the genocide. I thought I was being very clever, but I was wrong (again), apparently, because for reasons unknown it has been split up into two separate reviews. Slightly annoying, but anyway:
Go buy the books, of course, and read my reviews (preferably as one text) if you want to know why in rather many details. One review is on a thorough account of how ethno-religious and economic tensions led to pogroms and massacres in Adana and beyond in the context of political turmoil and profoundly unequal power distribution. What loomed above it all was Turkish imperialism, structural chauvinism, and the perceived need to homogenize. Which was let loose, very organized and without restraints, from 1915.
The other review is on the mainly unarmed resistance to mass violence in the Syrian desert during the second phase of the Armenian genocide. When a somewhat rudimentary ideology, containing larger or smaller traces of nationalism, imperialism, (proto-)racism, ethnocentrism, militarization, Islamism, pan-Turkism, and Western-inspired views of centralization, effectivization, and homogenization, had been turned into reality under a Young Turk leadership obsessed with securitization, among other things, in a world at war.
Here, Mouradian also gives a fascinating account of the widespread Ottoman concentration camp/death camp system, complete with kapos and what not. Indispensable if you're into the comparative aspects of camps as means of incarceration, demographic engineering, punishment, extermination, etc.
Also, in the reviews you get sort of a bonus with some Scandinavian accounts I haven't published or translated before. For instance one by a Danish soldier in a German machine gun unit in the Syrian desert encountering an Armenian death march. And getting filled with righteous anger.
The whole International Journal of Armenain Genocide Studies issue is open access, lots of good stuff in there, such as Regina Galustyan on the racial nationalism of the CUP/Young Turks, Vartan Matiossian on language, politics, and the Armenian genocide, and Tessa Hofmann on the Ottoman genocide of the Christians (yep, they targeted Greeks and Assyrians for annihilation as well) in German migrant prose:
http://agmipublications.am/index.php/ijags/issue/view/9
http://agmipublications.am/index.php/ijags/article/view/63
http://agmipublications.am/index.php/ijags/article/view/64
Actually, I wrote one review essay tracing some sort of arc in time, space, and human behavior from Adana before, during, and after the massacres of 1909 to the killing fields of Syria during and after the genocide. I thought I was being very clever, but I was wrong (again), apparently, because for reasons unknown it has been split up into two separate reviews. Slightly annoying, but anyway:
Go buy the books, of course, and read my reviews (preferably as one text) if you want to know why in rather many details. One review is on a thorough account of how ethno-religious and economic tensions led to pogroms and massacres in Adana and beyond in the context of political turmoil and profoundly unequal power distribution. What loomed above it all was Turkish imperialism, structural chauvinism, and the perceived need to homogenize. Which was let loose, very organized and without restraints, from 1915.
The other review is on the mainly unarmed resistance to mass violence in the Syrian desert during the second phase of the Armenian genocide. When a somewhat rudimentary ideology, containing larger or smaller traces of nationalism, imperialism, (proto-)racism, ethnocentrism, militarization, Islamism, pan-Turkism, and Western-inspired views of centralization, effectivization, and homogenization, had been turned into reality under a Young Turk leadership obsessed with securitization, among other things, in a world at war.
Here, Mouradian also gives a fascinating account of the widespread Ottoman concentration camp/death camp system, complete with kapos and what not. Indispensable if you're into the comparative aspects of camps as means of incarceration, demographic engineering, punishment, extermination, etc.
Also, in the reviews you get sort of a bonus with some Scandinavian accounts I haven't published or translated before. For instance one by a Danish soldier in a German machine gun unit in the Syrian desert encountering an Armenian death march. And getting filled with righteous anger.
The whole International Journal of Armenain Genocide Studies issue is open access, lots of good stuff in there, such as Regina Galustyan on the racial nationalism of the CUP/Young Turks, Vartan Matiossian on language, politics, and the Armenian genocide, and Tessa Hofmann on the Ottoman genocide of the Christians (yep, they targeted Greeks and Assyrians for annihilation as well) in German migrant prose:
http://agmipublications.am/index.php/ijags/issue/view/9
http://agmipublications.am/index.php/ijags/article/view/63
http://agmipublications.am/index.php/ijags/article/view/64
