Edinburgh University Press Survivor Archives of the Armenian Genocide: Remnants, Affects and Embodiments (Alternative Histories: Narratives from the Middle East and Mediterranean)

Demonstrates how objects, bodies, artistic practices, and diasporic performances function as archives of survival and knowledge Demonstrates how diverse remnants, including tattoos, photographs, looted artworks, mass graves, family objects, textiles, activism and film, generate historical knowledge Examines understudied cultural and historical sources, including literature, war-crimes tribunal records, museum objects, forensic evidence, film and diasporic artistic activism Develops methods for reading absence, materiality and affect through archives, oral histories, photographs, museum catalogues, forensic evidence and artists’ archives Extends debates in genocide studies to propose new methodological and ethical approaches to post-genocidal afterlives Survivor Archives uncovers the vibrant afterlives of materials, gestures, images, and artistic practices that endure long after episodes of mass political violence. How do objects, bodies and performances remember what history tries to erase? These 'remnants' – from textiles to photographs, bones to plays, and to genocide survivors themselves – speak, resist and reimagine the past. The volume reframes archives not as dusty repositories but as living terrains of grief, desire and radical knowledge. Drawing on the archival, affective and embodied turns in contemporary cultural studies, Survivor Archives brings together a distinguished group of historians, critics, artists and activists to chart a bold cartography of endurance. Focusing on Armenian genocide studies while pushing far beyond its conventional borders, the chapters traverse literary readings of Hagop Oshagan, legal analyses of Ottoman war crimes tribunals, humanitarian photography, museum misattribution, commemorative practices that enhance intercommunal solidarities and postmigrant coexistence, the necropolitics of human remains, the textures of textile memory, and the poetics of diasporic film. Together, the contributions expand historical, cultural and political notions of what constitutes an 'archive'.