This presentation discusses the commemorations of the Armenian genocide in relation to the burgeoning literature on transnational and European memories. Even though transnational studies of remembrance shed significant light on how movements caused by wars, mass atrocities, slavery, colonialism, immigration, transnational capitalism, and global mass communication shape a dynamic field of commemoration, the memories of the extermination of Armenians, which had been in flux and unfolding in transnational spaces for over a century, are understudied and undertheorized in this recent literature. This "transnational turn" in memory studies, while bringing fresh insights into commemorations of the previously well-studied cases of genocide such as the Holocaust, Rwanda, and former Yugoslavia, does not include the Armenian genocide within this framework.
In this presentation I contend that Armenian genocide commemorations constitute a venue where transnational memories of the genocide and the global cooperation for the genocide recognition can be recovered and systematically studied. Analyzing Armenian genocide commemorations in an innovative 'event-oriented' approach this presentation focuses on certain turning points in the history of commemorations. I seek to critically engage with the emerging literature on transnationality and nationality of commemorations and Europeanization of memories to further elaborate on their theoretical insights.
I delineate the trajectory of the transnationalization of genocide memorialization that took place since the Second World War primarily based on the Holocaust remembrance as a global model that later incorporated memorialization of genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in Europe and beyond. Developing in resonance with human rights discourses and practices and operating with ideological constructs such as "never again", "facing the past", "duty to remember" and "justice for victims," the transnational genocide memorialization has become the institutionally-backed and dominant frame after the 1990s. The Armenian genocide, to a great extent, was not included in this frame. The memorialization of the Armenian genocide followed a different pattern than the other cases constituting the commemorative canon and characterizing Europeanization of memories. One can argue that Turkey's denial of the genocide paved the way for a peculiar case of transnational politics of memory that unfolds on multiple scales with multiple agents of memory seeking to shape how the past is framed, interpreted, and represented in the present.
