Elyse Semerdjian’s Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide is a welcome and powerful addition to recent works taking up more nuanced approaches to gender/sexuality, agency/resistance, and particularly the “body as text” within studies of the Armenian Genocide. Mining memoirs, letters, newspapers, biographies, oral histories, ethnography, photography and film in a half dozen languages, Remnants models the best vein of feminist scholarship and its injunctions to think intersectionally, foreground subaltern voices, undermine traditional archival biases, and generously invite multiple fields into conversation.
The work opens by pairing autoethnography with the unflinching beauty of Loutfie Bilemdjian, a survivor deported, trafficked, and sold between Chechen, Kurdish, and Turkish men from Aintab to Dayr al-Zur, Viranşehir, and Ras al-‘Ayn, from which she finally found her way to Danish humanitarian Karen Jeppe’s Rescue Home in Aleppo (5–6). Structurally, the work unfolds in three parts: “Bodies,” “Skin,” and “Bones.” Part I, “Bodies,” plays on the...
University of California Press