idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft

Nachrichten, Termine, Experten

Grafik: idw-Logo
Grafik: idw-Logo

idw - Informationsdienst
Wissenschaft

Science Video Project
idw-Abo

idw-News App:

AppStore

Google Play Store



Instanz:
Teilen: 
25.06.2020 12:41

Embattled Dreamlands. The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish Memory

Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)
Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V. (GWZ)

    In his recently published book “Embattled Dreamlands. The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish Memory“ (Routledge 2020), David Leupold discusses competing memories and narratives in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia, or Northern Kurdistan.

    In the region surrounding the Lake Van in Southeastern Turkey, where the collective experiences of violence that lie in the past (the genocide of Armenians in 1915), bleed into the present (the persisting Kurdish conflict). In his work, David Leupold sheds light on the multi-layered memory landscape of this post-Ottoman, post-Soviet space of transition. Here he goes beyond the study of complex changing relationships between competing national discourses, produced by Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish memory regimes. Based on his extensive field work, he furthermore studies the narratives of non-state memory collectives, which constitute the Lake Van region as a memory landscape in present-day Turkey and Armenia.

    His work examines the interactions of four fields of institutionalised and constructed collective memory by the state: the narrating, silencing, mapping, and performing of the past. In contrast to this, the local spaces of memory of the Lake Van region are conceptualised as ‘mnemonic frontiers‘– spaces of multicollective practices of memory, that encounter state-sanctioned politics through the creation of counter-narratives on different levels, i.e. the cosmopolitan narrative of the Bajarî-Kurds in Bitlis, the narrative of resistance of the Behdinanî-Kurds from Hakkari, and cross-border narratives of Kurdophone Yazidis and Armenians in Armenia.

    At the forefront of his work is not merely displaying the separation between discourses of the population of either side of the closed Armenian-Turkish border, but instead to show how both societies are connected through mutual patterns of remembrance. These encompass histories of multi-ethnic coexistence, daily experiences of multilingualism, interreligious family ties, and experiences of collective resistance against the deportations of 1915. Here Leupold’s book not only creates a line of continuity between the Armenian genocide and the present-day Kurdish conflict, but also contributes a new, interdisciplinary perspective to a sustainable process of reconciliation between Armenians, Turks, and Kurds.

    David Leupold is a research fellow in the research group “Representations of the Past“ at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. Since 2010, he dedicates his research explicitly to questions surrounding spacial perception, historical narratives, and collective violence. His longstanding experiences in the region and pronounced language skills in Armenian, Kurmanji Kurdish, and Turkish, allow the author unique access to a highly sensitive thematic field. Based on his research at the Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Michigan, a book in close cooperation with the renowned historian Ronald G. Suny resulted, that is distinguished due to its multitude of perspectives, impartiality, and empathy.

    Interviews regarding his research and general background information about the Armenian or Kurdish questions can be arranged with David Leupold in German, Armenian, English, Russian, or Turkish.


    Wissenschaftliche Ansprechpartner:

    Dr. David Leupold: david.leupold@zmo.de


    Originalpublikation:

    David Leupold: Embattled Dreamlands. The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory, Routledge 2020, 248 pp, https://www.routledge.com/Embattled-Dreamlands-The-Politics-of-Contesting-Armeni...


    Weitere Informationen:

    https://readymag.com/relictsofanotherfuture/1820336/
    https://www.zmo.de/en/people/david-leupold


    Bilder

    Book cover
    Book cover


    Merkmale dieser Pressemitteilung:
    Journalisten, Studierende, Wissenschaftler
    Geschichte / Archäologie, Gesellschaft, Politik
    überregional
    Forschungsergebnisse, Wissenschaftliche Publikationen
    Englisch


     

    Hilfe

    Die Suche / Erweiterte Suche im idw-Archiv
    Verknüpfungen

    Sie können Suchbegriffe mit und, oder und / oder nicht verknüpfen, z. B. Philo nicht logie.

    Klammern

    Verknüpfungen können Sie mit Klammern voneinander trennen, z. B. (Philo nicht logie) oder (Psycho und logie).

    Wortgruppen

    Zusammenhängende Worte werden als Wortgruppe gesucht, wenn Sie sie in Anführungsstriche setzen, z. B. „Bundesrepublik Deutschland“.

    Auswahlkriterien

    Die Erweiterte Suche können Sie auch nutzen, ohne Suchbegriffe einzugeben. Sie orientiert sich dann an den Kriterien, die Sie ausgewählt haben (z. B. nach dem Land oder dem Sachgebiet).

    Haben Sie in einer Kategorie kein Kriterium ausgewählt, wird die gesamte Kategorie durchsucht (z.B. alle Sachgebiete oder alle Länder).