Overview

Commemoration is considered essential to any project of confronting a nation’s violent past. Opinions on commemoration tend to focus on representation and reception: how the commemoration narrates the violence and how the public responds to it. However, this focus ignores the reality of violence’s continuing presence, including in the very public spaces of commemoration. The urgency of rethinking this focus has been nowhere more salient than in the case of contemporary Turkey, whose image on the world stage has rapidly descended from a regional beacon of democratization and prosperity to a hotbed of conflict and oppression within the space of a few recent years. In Victims of Commemoration, Çayli explores both activist and official commemorations at sites of state-endorsed violence in Turkey. Çayli unpacks the reverberations of these commemorative acts and artifacts across the everyday life of the city where each site is located. The first comprehensive account of space’s centrality to confronting state-endorsed violence, this volume draws upon ethnographic research gathered throughout the first half of the 2010s, the period of Turkey’s quickly deteriorating global image. Victims of Commemoration challenges our tendency to understand the cultural practice of commemoration as distinct from violence, revealing the ways in which these memorial sites often exist alongside and at times exacerbate the violence itself.

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9780815637547

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Reviews

This skillfully narrated account of urban architectural space and the present experience of the past will be of interest to anyone interested in understanding the social life of monuments.-- Charles Stewart, University College London A brilliant contribution in the wider literatures of violence and trauma, collective memory, commemoration and memorialization, ethno-national identity, and the ethnographies and geographies of each.-- Kyle Evered, Michigan State University Bold and original, Victims of Commemoration charts important new territory for the field of memory studies. It offers a fascinating ethnographic study of three Turkish sites of political violence and focuses especially on the shaping role of space and architecture. In this theoretically rich work, Eray Cayli argues convincingly that commemoration is not just a response to violence--it is often entangled with violence itself, a continuation of the very conflict that we think we're merely remembering.-- Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators What is the relationship between an event of historical violence and its subsequent commemoration? Brilliantly challenging our received understandings of historical representation, Victims of Commemoration analyzes how the violence of the past persists in the formation of public spaces and built environments.-- Kabir Tambar, Stanford University

The argument represents an innovative contribution in what is now a vast literature on political memory in Turkey and elsewhere. A brilliant contribution in the wider literatures of violence and trauma, collective memory, commemoration and memorialization, ethno-national identity, and the ethnographies and geographies of each.

Author Information

Eray Çayli is the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the European Institute at the London School of Economics.

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