Serap Ruken Sengul, Manoogian Simone Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow, U-M

The infamous city of the “death’s end” in 1915 and the center of the ongoing Kurdish conflict in Turkey since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Diyarbakir has become a key site of counter-hegemonic knowledges and activism on the Armenian Genocide over the last two decades. This talk explores popular narratives on the historical Armenian experiences of violence and suffering that inscribe Kurdish negotiations of identity, history, and experience in the present-day city. While the imprint of the Armenian past on the Kurdish present is the orienting theme of the talk, its larger focus is on temporal orientations of ethics and justice that structure these narratives. Teasing out the non-historicist notions of temporality that orient Kurdish reckonings with the Genocide, this talk seeks to explore how such conceptions of time and justice might open up possibilities for imagining historical justice beyond the confines of modern historical imagination and legal regimes of reconciling with the past.