Facing the Past: Aesthetic Possibility and the Image of "Super-Survivor"

Abstract

abstract:Through a consideration of three film works—Ravished Armenia/Auction of Souls (1919), Testimony (2007), and Remembering (2019), which all represent the testimonies of Armenian women to form truths of the catastrophe—this article problematizes how such portrayals might, contrary to their best intentions, resonate with the logic of genocide. By discussing specific woman figures in the three works, published at three times in the postgenocidal era—one just after the events, the other two recently—this article aims not only to mark the evolution of the representational regime with which the Armenian woman is surrounded but also to show that this phenomenon is a key component in a transformation of the lexicon developed around the recognition politics, which ought to involve something other than feverishly chasing a representation of the events of 1915–17 and using women's witness narratives to this end.