2017/01/01 by Stefan Ihrig · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Turkey's Politics and Society
paper · doi:10.1093/hgs/dcx048
openalex publication_date 2017/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
For more than one hundred years the battle between denial and recognition of the Armenian Genocide has raged, with limited success for the latter. A key problem is the variance in availability of information worldwide and the lack of consensus about that information among audiences “Turkish,” “Armenian,” and “international.” That the most strident promoter of denialism is the Turkish government itself poses a problem. The resulting discrepancy in discourses is staggering. But, as the book under review illustrates, a plethora of information is available, as are alternative narratives, even in Turkey and even in works by Turkish authors. Unlike some academic and popular contributions whose authors rushed them into print for the Genocide’s 2015/2016 centennial, Göcek’s volume had been in the works for twelve years. Nor is this surprising, given its scope: a grand analysis of denial, memory, and acknowledgment, as well as the construction of an entirely new narrative. Not a history of denial per se, nor yet a history of violence and memory, the volume is an experiment in historical discourse analysis. Göcek sets out to narrate the history of violence and subsequent rationalizations, denial, and forgetting almost exclusively through memoirs published in modern Turkish: covering the last two centuries of Turkish and Ottoman history, Göcek bases her analysis on a very large corpus of work: “I decided to systematically read all books printed in Turkey in Turkish after the Latin script reform of 1928 that contained people’s recollections of what went on around them from the year 1789 to 2009.” Her selection came down to about 310 “memoir writers’ accounts” (p. 54), freely accessible books by both ethnic Turks and minority authors. This combination allows Göcek to contrast fruitfully various perspectives on common events or contexts.