Border-Crossers

Abstract

This chapter examines how public memory can lead to action and how, in turn, social action can trigger memory. As a history that many wished to be forgotten, the Armenian Genocide resides in political memory such that its denial has also become part of Turkish identity. Accordingly, any apologetic engagement with that past is seen by Turkish nationalists and the Turkish state as a threat to social cohesion (Uğur Ümit Üngör (2014) “Lost in Commemoration: The Armenian Genocide in Memory and Identity.” Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 2 (2014/03/15 2014): pp. 147–166). Although Armenian political and cultural institutions organized commemorations on the official Remembrance Day (April 24), until the late 2000s commemorations of the Genocide had not been a component of the larger memory landscape in Turkey. This chapter discusses border-crossing strategies that help us understand how activists in Turkey were, by leaps and bounds, able to create and mobilize new meanings of the avoided or denied past of the Armenian genocide, including the representations of the Armenian Genocide while creating new memories of solidarity with different social groups in and outside of Turkey. In this way, the chapter examines how the mobilizing strategies of young adults’ grassroots movements that often transcend various divides can help us to understand the role of memory in social action and agency in memory protest.