Repetition and uncanny temporalities: Armenians and the recurrence of genocide in the Levant

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Despair
• genocide
• haunting
• hope
• repetition

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many interlocutors but want to mention in particular Paul Haidostian, Araz Kojayan, Vahakn Keshishian, and Hrayr Cholokian and family. Likewise, I thank Simon Coleman for fruitful conversations and mutual work on the notion of repetition over the years. Thanks are due to all panelists at the original panel at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC, 2014, and to our engaged discussant Ghassan Hage. The paper has benefited tremendously from being presented at departmental anthropology seminars at the University of Edinburgh, University College London, and University of Copenhagen. Insightful comments from those audiences helped sharpen the paper, and I here would like to thank Charles Stewart, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic, Ruth Mandel, Maya Mayblin, Janet Carsten, Magnus Course, Tom Boylston, Tobias Kelly, John Harries, Lotte Buch, Morten Pedersen, Matthew Carey, Anja Kublitz, Lars Højer, Stine Simonsen Puri, Birgitte Stampe Holst, and Inger Sjørslev for their comments and questions. Lastly, I would like to thank the reviewers as well as editor, David Henig for excellent critique and feedback. All infelicities obviously remain my own. I thank the The Danish Council for Independent Research in the Humanities | Culture and Communication for funding of fieldwork in Lebanon and for covering research stays in Toronto.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For alternative explorations of the notion of repetition, I refer to my published work on Christian Syrians and their engagement with their social and political environment (Bandak 2014) as well as their formation through repeated prayers (Bandak 2017).

Additional information

Funding

I thank the The Danish Council for Independent Research in the Humanities | Culture and Communication for funding of fieldwork in Lebanon and for covering research stays in Toronto.