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Phantom Limbs: Embodied Horror And The Uncanny Within Unmarked Spaces Of Mass Atrocity
Abstract
The affective horror of the Armenian Genocide has left traces upon the living. This paper gathers an affective archive of written accounts, images, and oral histories of visitors to these sites of mass atrocity in contemporary Syria and Turkey. Within this history of emotions, pilgrims past and present experience profound sense of sadness and tears of mourning, but also describe experiences of feeling the uncanny and even physical ailment during their visits. I attempt to historicize these affective experiences by considering the historical spaces within which they occur. I suggest that some who visit spaces where Armenian Genocide atrocities were committed a century ago may be unsettled temporally, geographically, and bodily because they are visitors to haunted spaces, haunted because they remain unmarked by monuments and ceremonial time. Roma Sendayka has called such spaces “non-sites of memory.” How do communal memories of horrific bodily violence sometimes result in embodied hauntings? How have visitors historically enacted rituals and memory performances—including collecting bones of martyrs— in an attempt to vacate the affective necrogeography of ghosts by naming the unnamed dead?
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Syria
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries