Verwantschap in vroegere tijden, verwantschap in de toekomst

Abstract

In this essay I ask questions that, while crucial to the lived legacies of the Catastrophe, are all too often neglected in favor of overly-familiar questions of recognition and reconciliation. How have presumptions about kinship functioned to sanction and sanctify state-sponsored and vigilante violence, as well as the less visible but no less disciplinary acts of normative power exercised by nationalisms, both diasporic and statist, on a quotidian scale? And how might we imagine kinships that stand against such violent and normative powers, future kinships for which there is no precise precedent? I show how two recent cultural texts offer some provocative answers: Aikaterini Gegisian’s “Self-Portrait as an Ottoman Woman”, a curated collection of popular postcard portraits of women in folkloric guises from the early twentieth century; and “AH-HA,” a collaboration between the artists Nina Katchadourian and Ahmet Ögüt for the Blind Dates Project curated by Defne Ayas and Neery Melkonian. I cull from these two insightful reflections on kinships past some ways of imagining kinship’s futures that challenge, or at least unsettle, the normative terms that continue to structure discourse on the Catastrophe.