Enduring Erasures is a historical ethnography exploring the predicament of Armenians who, as opposed to those expelled in the course of the Armenian genocide initiated in 1915, remained in what later became the Republic of Turkey, specifically its Asian territory. Unlike much of the existing literature on the topic, this book positions the Armenian genocide as a temporal beginning rather than an endpoint for the study of Armenian life in the region. Hakem Amer Al-Rustom examines the manifold afterlives of genocidal violence and uprooting, finding their traces in subsequent Turkish state policies and the continued structural violence that have shaped the experiences of the minoritized Armenian citizens of the Republic of Turkey. He extends the timeframe of his study from the years immediately following the end of World War I in 1918 to roughly the first fifteen years of the 21st century. The geographical framing of his ethnography expands from Turkey all the way to France—a central destination of Armenian exodus both in the immediate aftermath of the genocide and in the later decades of the second half of the 20th century.
The central contribution of Enduring Erasures is its proposed historiographic intervention, encapsulated in what Al-Rustom conceptualizes as the “denativization” of those he identifies, following the emic usage of his interlocutors, as “Anatolian Armenians:” “the Armenian survivors in Turkey, outside of Istanbul” (p. 9). “Denativization,” here, is defined as an ongoing process of uprooting, dispossession, and erasure that has been severing Armenians from the region not just through physical destruction and displacement, but also through structural marginalization and silencing in official historiography and nationalist narratives. This “denativization” has also manifested in the elimination or repurposing of Armenian material heritage in the post-genocide landscape. Through this more expansive framework, Al-Rustom rewrites the history of the Armenian predicament in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods, moving away from an event-based historiography and instead calling attention to “a single catastrophic history that both cleansed Armenians from Anatolia and is cleansing Anatolia of traces that they ever existed on the land” (p. 15).
The title Enduring Erasures carries a dual meaning that runs through the book, conveying both how the act of erasing persists beyond its most largescale and catastrophic manifestation, the genocide, and how those who survived that cataclysmic episode and stayed in post-genocide Turkey endure the manifold manifestations and effects of the ongoing process of erasure. Here, Al-Rustom adopts Vizenor’s conceptual tool of “survivance,” using it instead of mere “survival,” to also account for Anatolian Armenians’ proactive enduring through their “active assertion of presence” in more recent times (p. 25). He explores this phenomenon in the last chapter of the book, referring, particularly, to the intellectual-political work of the late Hrant Dink, who was persecuted, prosecuted, and eventually killed in 2007 in Istanbul for challenging the very policies of denativization that the book convincingly unearths.
What Al-Rustom offers is, in his own words, a “counter-history” that, beyond simply re-inserting the history of the marginalized into dominant nationalist narratives, aims to disrupt the latter by critically exposing their deliberate omissions and calculated erasures. After a discussion of the gaps, ruptures, and distortions concerning Armenians and the genocide in official Turkish historiography, the book returns to the history of the Turkish War of Independence that led to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, highlighting the various episodes through which it aimed to complete the uprooting and dispossession of Armenians from the region. The book offers a re-reading of the foundational Treaty of Lausanne from an Armenian vantage point, scrutinizing the document as one that furthered the denativization of Armenians by refusing them any form of sovereignty and reducing them to a minoritized non-Muslim community that would subsequently be marginalized as “foreign” through the lens of racialized perceptions of inassimilable otherness. The book’s historiographical critique also extends to the canonical Armenian narratives that, driven by a focus on Armenian victimhood and an urge to counter Turkish denialism, have often marked the genocide as an endpoint to Armenian presence in the region, largely ignoring Armenians remaining there and thus, as the book suggests, bringing their own share to Armenian estrangement from it.
Al-Rustom also discusses the Turkification of the landscape emptied of its Armenian inhabitants, referring to the repurposing and destruction of the Armenian-built environment and to toponymic changes erasing the Armenian past. Yet while he briefly notes that the term “Anatolian” has often been used as “a category that subsumes the region’s diverse histories and cultures under a homogenized Turkish national framework,” the fact that the book adopts the term “Anatolia”—after first introducing it through its use by an interlocutor and thereby foregrounding its emic provenance—may have warranted a more expansive and centrally placed critical discussion of its history (p. 196). This is particularly the case given the eastward expansion of “Anatolia” in 1941 through the creation of the Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia regions encompassing the formerly Armenian-populated and still predominantly Kurdish regions where many of the places discussed in the book are located—superseding alternative, non-Turkish geographical designations with a history of local and wider usage, such as “Armenian Highlands” and “Kurdistan.”
Al-Rustom further explores the continued displacement of Armenians from Anatolia to Istanbul. He discusses the impact of state policies such as the Settlement Law of 1934, which primarily targeted the region’s Kurdish population, and the resettlement of Balkan Muslims in Armenian homes, as well as the effects of local violence, including kidnappings of Armenian girls and pressures on Armenians to convert to Islam by Muslim sheikhs and Kurdish aghas. The absence of Armenian institutions in the region, in contrast to Istanbul, as well as the role of the Armenian Church in Istanbul, which attempted to “salvage” the Armenians remaining in Anatolia from “assimilation” by bringing their children to the city and enlisting them in community schools, are examined as additional factors contributing to this continued migration. As a result of this movement to Istanbul, the author compellingly shows, Anatolian Armenians were not only physically displaced from the land, but also pressured, even if implicitly, to abandon their Anatolian ways of life, customs, and languages, as they faced estrangement and scrutiny by Istanbulite Armenians for not fitting the latter’s idealized vision of Armenianness—another “denativizing” process they would also encounter when meeting the Armenian community in France.
To trace the myriad manifestations of this history of denativization and survivance in the post-Lausanne context, the author relies on a close reading of literary and journalistic publications, memoirs, and travel accounts produced in Turkish, Armenian, and English discussing Armenian life in post-genocide Anatolia. The book also draws on oral histories, testimonies, and observations collected through ethnographic engagement during fieldwork Al-Rustom conducted in the Armenian-inhabited town of Alfortville in France between 2007–2009 and 2011–2012, as well as in Istanbul through annual summer visits between 2007–2013.
The book’s ethnographic anchoring in the French–Armenian diasporic setting is productive in its own right. First, it traces connections (and disconnects) between Armenian diasporic experiences, imaginaries, and places of origin left behind in contemporary Turkey—questions mostly overlooked in Armenian diaspora studies perhaps due to the ongoing estrangement this book probes. Second, it brings the text into conversation with diaspora studies, scholarship on French colonial history, and scholarship on refugees and immigrants in France, extending its contribution beyond the fields of Armenian, Turkish, and (post-)Ottoman studies. These interventions emerge specifically in Chapter 5, where Al-Rustom argues that the post-genocide Armenian community in France has ultimately deepened its alienation from Anatolia by, on the one hand, attempting to reposition itself as “native” in France in search of full belonging and, on the other hand, reorienting itself toward the Republic of Armenia as an alternative Armenian “homeland.”
Yet, parallel to the immersive ethnographic work in France, this “investigative ethnography” of Armenian erasure and survivance in Anatolia would have benefited from further ethnographic anchoring in Anatolia itself, beyond Istanbul, especially in localities that still have Armenian residents (p. xii). Although the author mentions having made short visits to a few such destinations and draws on a conversation with the caretaker of the Armenian church in Diyarbakır in the introductory pages of Chapter 3, the text is, overall, not grounded in sustained ethnographic engagement in Turkey’s Anatolian regions and the contemporary Armenian communities remaining there. Similarly, in its exploration of Anatolian Armenians’ acts of survivance that affirm belonging in the region, compellingly demonstrated through textual engagement with Hrant Dink’s writings and speeches and a poem by Karin Karakaşlı (another Armenian from Turkey), the study would have been enhanced by ethnographic engagement with and discussion of the several Anatolian Armenian “hometown associations” (hemşeri dernekleri) in Istanbul founded and burgeoning during the author’s fieldwork years. These are particularly relevant as they work to sustain connections with the hometowns of their members and, on several occasions, have undertaken restoration work on Armenian heritage sites there, thus exemplifying such survivance and re-anchoring in Anatolia.
Written with much eloquence, the book is engaging—save for occasional repetition within and across chapters—and at times even moving, as it successfully, yet carefully and responsibly, brings readers close to its subjects and their pain, nostalgia, defiance, and survivance. The author firmly brings his analysis and claims in conversation with several lines of scholarly literature, ranging from history to philosophy, anthropology, and critical theory. The book therefore has cross-disciplinary relevance, coupled with comparative insights through its engagement with scholarly work on other communities enduring reverberations of violence, including Indigenous, Black, and post-Holocaust Jewish communities. Beyond its historiographical and conceptual contributions, Enduring Erasures ultimately counters one of the central processes of denativization it probes by writing Armenian history and experience back onto Anatolia.
