This lecture introduces the concept of “denativization” to explore how Armenians in Turkey underwent this transformation. Denativization goes beyond human rights violations, addressing the systemic erasure of Armenian presence, identity, and history that continues long after the genocide, even as the vast Anatolian landscape has been emptied of Armenians. Through an examination of historical events, policies, and cultural shifts, this lecture illustrates how Armenians, once integral to the social and cultural fabric of Anatolia, were systematically marginalized and rendered alien in the land of their ancestors.

Denativization intervenes in historiography by challenging the genocide-centered framework that traditionally marks a definitive end to Armenian presence in Anatolia. Instead, it represents the afterlives of the Armenian genocide, showing that the erasure and marginalization of Armenians did not conclude with the genocide but persist through various forms of cultural and historical denial and revisionism. This approach shifts the narrative from a singular catastrophic event to a continuous process of erasure and survivance, highlighting the enduring impact of these historical injustices on the Armenian community. Through this lens, the lecture seeks to broaden the understanding of ethnic and cultural erasure, emphasizing the need for a more nuanced approach to addressing such historical injustices.

Dr. Marlene Schäfers (Utrecht University) will offer her commentary after the lecture. Dr. Ayşenur Korkmaz (Meertens Institute) will serve as a moderator.

About the speakers

Hakem Al-Rustom is the Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History, and Assistant Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His work interrogates ruins of undocumented histories, ethnographic silences, and memory as methods for historical ethnographies in the aftermath of violence. He is the co-editor of Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press). Al Rustom is currently finishing his monograph titled Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide (Columbia University Press), forthcoming in 2025.

Marlene Schäfers Dr. Schäfers is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her research explores state violence, gendered and intimate lives, the politics of death, and the intersections of affect and politics, with a focus on the Kurdish regions and modern Turkey.Her first monograph, Voices that Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey (University of Chicago Press, 2022), examines Kurdish women’s struggles for voice and the challenges of liberal politics. Dr. Schäfers’ current project investigates the politics of afterlives in the Middle East.

Ayşenur Korkmaz is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Meertens Institute working as a part of the ERC-funded MAKEBELIEF project focusing on religion heritage immersive media and neoimperial imaginaries․ Her research interests lie in the nexus between mass violence, cultural heritage, and genealogy in post-genocide landscapes. Korkmaz published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in Armenia. Her book project focuses on how genealogical imaginaries and the practice of pedigree-making in Armenia tell the history of the Armenian genocide from bottom-up micro perspectives.