Remnants, Embodied Archives Of The Armenian Genocide, Elyse Semerdjian (softcover)

Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or a national stain, and the bodies of women and children were of central prominence within the humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants, these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and—in what remains of those lives a century afterward—bones. Elyse Semerdjian writes a deeply personal history, exploring how the Armenian communal body in the Ottoman Empire was dismembered, disfigured, and ultimately re-membered by the survivor community.