Montreal film maker Araz Artinian in her documentary "The Genocide in me", undertakes a personal journey to understand her identity. Much like Adrienne Rich's "Notes toward a politics of location", she begins by the geography closest to her: Herself; Her body or the embodiment of the Genocide in her. Araz attempts to seek the disappearing traces in the perpetrators' silences and the remains that attempt to bear witness in a touristic tour that she takes in Eastern Turkey - historic Armenia. This paper aims to examine through a feminist perspective of self-reflexivity Genocide as embodied knowledge and of "bearing witness" in the midst of the perpetrator's denial.

Migirdic Margosyan, in his autobiographical novel "Soyle Margos Nerelisene [Tell me Margos, where are you fromo]," narrates his childhood and his surroundings through multiple voices including his and his neighbors'. Polyphonic construction of his memoir is analogous to his fragmented identity as an Armenian in South Eastern Turkey, living in a multiethnic environment that included Armenians and Kurds under a Turkish government. Margosyan's memoir as a witness account challenges official narratives of Turkish national historiography from the margins. Thus analyzing memoirs that are marginalized within the context of national histories provides ample tools to examine the underlying claims of "truth" of history, which represents the past and shapes the present, with a consideration of the discipline of history as the most effective claim of constructing the "true" accounts of the past. I am focusing on this paper (1) discussing the ways that memoirs by the subaltern have the potential to challenge the hegemonic nature of historical writing about national subjects. (2) raising questions on whether the genealogical approach can offer an understanding for past and present, such as how we can reconcile the past by distinguishing the agents of history and subjects of itd What kind of role does the dichotomy between history and memory play in claiming to represent "truth" and (3) arguing that autobiographical fictions and memoirs by the subaltern provide strategies to scrutinize the myth of a unified autobiographical "I" analogous to "traditional" historical narrative; that is to say the illusion of a unified, progressive and secular nature of modern subject emerge in multiple narratives as in history and autobiographies. With a focus on the polyphonic nature of Margosyan's narrative construction of a child's perspective in a multi-ethnic, multilingual surrounding, paper raises necessary question in order to analyze memoirs by the subaltern.

Despite the growing literature on the Armenian Genocide in recent decades, little has been written about the post-Genocide history of the Armenians or their decades-long struggle for justice in the face of Turkish denial of this atrocity. Most of the existing scholarship tapers off in the mid-1920s, leaving a major gap in the historiography. This study fills that gap by closely analyzing this period through the use of previously untapped archives, Freedom of Information Requests revealing never-before-seen government documents, and interviews of important participants. This era is divided into two time periods: pre and post-1965. Prior to 1965, Armenians hardly ever mentioned the Genocide outside of their families and communities. This silence allowed the Genocide - which had received a great deal of media attention during WWI and triggered the first major international humanitarian effort after the war - to disappear from the world's consciousness. In 1965, Armenians worldwide participated in massive demonstrations to reawaken the Genocide from its dormancy. Their endeavor collided head-on with Turkish denial of the Genocide, which grew in intensity and scope during the proceeding decades. Since 1965, the Armenian struggle for justice has been waged among various fronts. This study examines these fronts, from Armenian terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, to legislative battles across the world, to lawsuits against insurers and banks that may have profited from Armenian deaths. The study focuses on the role of the American government throughout this period, revealing its transformation from the greatest champion of the Armenians after WWI to Turkey's ally in denying the Genocide.

The Genocide of the Armenians almost a century ago is now sliding into the past, but unanswered questions persist: why did it happen? Why did the world let it happen? Justice has not been rendered, and Armenians cannot put their dead to rest. This obsession with the past keeps surfacing in their literature, reflecting the way they perceive the world. Denial of the crime and distortion of history fuel this obsession. Then, there is also the vague image of a lost homeland that kindles a sense of deprivation even in the most integrated Armenian American. The latter phenomenon has grown deeper under the influence of the trend in United States in the 1960s and 1970s to search for one's roots, a sense of belonging, and an identity connected to the past, to history, and to the other members of the group. American culture of the time facilitated group affiliation and identification. The Armenian past was obviously associated with the massacres and deportations. The memory of that collective traumatic past thus became the source of self-understanding and self-identity. This paper dwells briefly on the literature of the older generation Armenian American writers, such as David Kherdian, Peter Najarian, Diana Der Hovanessian, and others, to trace the shaping of that identity and then proceeds to follow the quest for self-identity in the literature of the new generation writers, such as Leonardo Alishan, Carol Edgarian, Peter Balakian, Vickie Smith Foston, Mae M. Derdarian, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and others. This paper shows how in some third-generation Armenian writers the Armenian component is gradually pulled out of a nebulous memory hole to become an important dimension in their self-identity and how in others the transmitted memory of images of suffering and death never did loosen its grip, imposing upon everyday life. The paper then returns to the initial question of why this obsession with the past, and, building on Ervin Staub's concept of the process of the healing denied to Armenians, concludes: historians are pushed to reiterate their irrefutable findings and probe deeper to discover new facts. Artists, writers, and poets use the medium best available to them to express that rage and prove in the way they know best, that what happened in 1915 could not be less than genocide. The third generation Armenian artistic expressions are inherent carriers of that state of mind and that mission.