‘It’s Happening Again’: Genocide, Denial, Exile and Trauma

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants have responded to the ongoing trauma of the genocide in the last three decades. In 1986, Donald E Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller published a chapter identifying six responses to the genocide, drawing on their oral history work: repression, rationalisation, resignation, reconciliation, rage and revenge. 526 In this essay I offer two extensions to this typology. First, I suggest a seventh response that has emerged in recent years: engagement with the Turkish government, civil society and individuals. Second, building on the 526 Donald E Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, ‘An Oral History Perspective on Responses to the Armenian Genocide’, in The Armenian Genocide in Perspective , ed. Richard G Hovannisian (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1986), 187–204. Miller and Miller later published their findings in a book, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).