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A collective memory in production: gender politics of 1938 in Turkey

  • Ozlem GonerEmail author
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A collective memory in production: gender politics of 1938 in Turkey1

In 1938, the Turkish state undertook a series of massacres in Dersim, a Kurdish-Alevi municipality in Eastern Turkey, killing thousands of people and forcing thousands more to move out of the town. The massacres were part of a genocidal project to exterminate any potential opposition from the Alevi, Kurdish, and Armenian residents of Dersim and to impose Sunni-Turkish identity on these groups. The event remained unacknowledged within official Turkish history and was not publicly discussed in Dersim until the newly found Dersim foundations in and outside of Turkey and a new generation of memory collectors introduced oral history and documentary projects to publicize the event. When I started my research on state violence, memory, and identity in Dersim in 2008, there was some interest in the topic, some discussions of the event and its repercussions in the diaspora-based journals, and two documentaries that could gain...

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© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Sociology and Anthropology, College of Staten IslandCUNYNew York CityUSA

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