ARMENIANS LIVING in TURKEY and the ASSASSINATION of HRANT DINK: LOSS, MOURNING and MELANCHOLIA
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sabanci University Research Database ARMENIANS LIVING IN TURKEY and THE ASSASSINATION OF HRANT DINK: LOSS, MOURNING and MELANCHOLIA This thesis is submitted to the Faculty of Art and Social Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Cultural Studies by Nora Tataryan ! Sabancı University Fall 2011 © Nora Tataryan 2011 All Rights Reserved "! ! ""! ! “Hrant Dink’e” """! ! ABSTRACT ARMENIANS LIVING IN TURKEY and THE ASSASSINATION OF HRANT DINK: LOSS, MOURNING and MELANCHOLIA Nora Tataryan Cultural Studies, MA, 2012 Thesis Advisor: Leyla Neyzi ! On January 19 2007, Hrant Dink, an Armenian journalist who had dedicated his life to Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and known by his critiques of Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide, was assassinated in the street by a radical nationalist. After the event, a strong civil resistance movement was ignited unexpectedly. Istanbul saw one such demonstration. Rather than a mere protest, it was a spontaneous reaction, where a hundred thousand people gathered and started shouting slogans such as: "We are all Armenian, we are all Hrant" and "Long live the brotherhood of the people." In my thesis, I will try to explain the affect of being Armenian in Turkey, based on the new political atmosphere after the assassination of Hrant Dink, through the notions of trauma, memory, mourning and melancholy. I will examine the civil associations and organizations founded after the assassination. This paper will give me the chance to review the literature that turns the corpus of melancholy and trauma upside down by attributing to them an activating role. Keywords: Armenians living in Turkey, Hrant Dink, Melancholy, Affect, Post- memory, Turkey "#! ! ÖZET TÜRK!YEL! ERMEN!LER ve HRANT D!NK’in ÖLÜMÜ: YAS, MELANKOL! ve KAYIP Nora Tataryan Kültürel Çalı"malar MA, 2012 Tez Danı"manı: Leyla Neyzi Bu tez Hrant Dink’in 19 Ocak 2007’de öldürülü!ünün, Türkiyeli Ermeniler özelinde nasıl algılandı"ına ili!kindir. Bir kırılma noktası olarak da okuyabilece"imiz bu olay, bize hem Ermeni Toplmunun geçmi!i nasıl hatırladı"ına ve hem de bu hafızanın bugü nasıl etkiledi"ine bakma !ansı verecek. Tezimde Türkiye’de bir Ermeni olarak ya!amanın nasıl bir duyguya tekabül etti"ine yas, melankoli ve kayıp kavramları üzerinden bakmaya çalı!aca"ım. Hrant Dink’in ölümünün ardından olu!an yeni politik atmosferi ve kurulan kurumları inceleyece"im tezim aynı zamanda Hrant Dink’in ölümünün nasıl bir dönü!üme i!aret etti"ine de ili!kin olacak. Anahtar Sözcükler: Türkiyeli Ermeniler, Hrant Dink, Melankoli, Duygulanım, Postbellek, Turkiye "! ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I cannot express how much I am indebted to so many people in my life without whom this thesis would have remained a mere dream. To begin with, I am thankful to my thesis advisor Leyla Neyzi who always stood by me, believed in what I was doing, encouraged me to write this thesis, and enriched it at every step with invaluable comments and feedback. Banu Karaca, Umut Yıldırım, whose classes I had the privilege of taking and learning so much from. I am also indebted to Ay!e Parla and Ay!e Kadıo"lu for being on my thesis committee and not only refining the thesis, but also pushing my own limits of knowledge with their insightful observations and comments. During the course of my fieldwork, I had the chance to meet amazing people. This thesis owes everything to their experiences and their willingness to share them with me. I am also indebted to my classmates and close friends Akanksha Misra and Anoush Suni respectively for helping me with the necessary editing. Finally, I wouldn’t have been able to achieve anything without the constant love, support, and encouragement of everyone around me. I am also indebted to my family classmates and close friends. "#! ! 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To some extent, expounding this transformation will disclose the problematic of my thesis. Before writing down my thesis, I was concerned about the way Armenians living in Turkey constructed their collective identity. I had intended to make criticism of this construction as I considered it to be defined through a mechanism similar to nationalist elements that form Turkish identity which was countered by the abovementioned construction in order to defend itself. I conducted over twenty interviews. I aimed to explore the way Armenians living in Turkey gather around a collective identity and the structure of the founding principles of this identity rather than the way they live or the things they do. Nonetheless, the fieldwork I conducted and the writing process of this thesis blur all of these notions. I would like to start to explain my confusion by problematizing the term “Armenians living in Turkey”.1 Just as it is misleading to think what we call Armenian society as homogenous, claiming that an Armenian living in Diyarbakır and an Armenian living in Vakıflıköy can be summarized into one term is equally false. Therefore whenever I use the word Armenian during my thesis I will be taking it up as a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 I could also use the term “Turkish Armenians” here, however I prefer to say Armenians living in Turkey since this term excludes the Turks who are converted after 1915. Here with the term Armenians living in Turkey I would like to refer the ones who are Turkish citizens and legally Armenian (Ozgul, 2009) "! ! conceptual term and I will be intending to refer to those who live in Istanbul today. I can explain the reasons of my adoption of the term through concepts I refrained from using and subsequently I dropped out. At the beginning of my fieldwork while I was attempting to understand the way Armenian identity is established, I was also thinking that what is called being an Armenian in Istanbul can be understood through three lines of thought and action as Yumul remarks: religion, language and endogamy (Yumul, 1992). I did not doubt a moment that the attitude formed around these concepts can be explained through theories of nationalism. As we are able to explore the historical ruptures of turkification policies – “Conscription of wealth”, “Compulsory military service”, “Citizen, speak Turkish Campaign” (Aktar, 2000) – which have been practiced since 1915 by discussing them under one title, so should we be able to explore Armenian nationalism as it can be analyzed through theories of the nationalism of oppressed peoples (Oran, 2002) which developed as a reaction of Turkish nationalism. As a result of these deductions I concluded that today in Turkey the backbone of Armenian society is established upon a similar type of nationalism and I embarked upon evaluating my ethnographic material through such perspective. However, nationalism was not only sufficient to explain that special case but also included some dangers which might have led one to neglect the main points of the issue. Today in an age where we can no longer speak of a nationalism but only plural nationalisms, the first