Abstract
Web 2.0 facilitates the articulation of transcultural solidarities between Armenian, Assyrian, Greek and Kurdish social media users. This has led to a growing trend for some Kurdish users to apologise for Kurdish complicity in Ottoman crimes, most notably the Armenian Genocide. These post-Ottoman solidarities layer different times and places, creating digital palimpsests where fantasies about place can be constructed, but fantasies that remain connected to enduring and historical place identities and concerns about future territorial borders. These multitemporal montages can foster reconciliation between erstwhile antagonists, lead to mutual recognition of shared victimhood, and perhaps even form the basis for a more inclusive sense of shared (lost) place. Yet, these solidarities can also incubate nationalist irredentism and othering. Moreover, they frequently founder on the very notions of territoriality and exclusive place identity that they sometimes seem ostensibly to transcend.
Highlights
Web 2.0 facilitates the articulation of transcultural solidarities between Armenian, Assyrian, Greek and Kurdish social media users
For all its temporal and compositional promiscuity, the result is not a nowhere but rather a connective somewhere: a digital palimpsest where fantasies about place can be constructed, yet fantasies that remain connected to enduring and historical place identities and concerns about future territorial borders. These digital palimpsests – precisely because they generate a multitemporality in which the Kurdish-Turkish conflict comes to be layered over earlier histories like the Armenian Genocide – have the potential to facilitate reconciliation between historical antagonists in which mutual recognition of shared victimhood and suffering trumps comparative and competitive victim stratification
Post-Ottoman solidarities face vociferous resistance from ‘within’: by users who object to the grouping together of erstwhile victims and perpetrators; by others concerned that their online forums have been hijacked by ultranationalists; by Armenians/Assyrians/Greeks who suspect that Kurdish apology is motivated by political expediency; and by Kurdish users who dispute Kurdish complicity or who worry that Armenians are abusing Kurdish remorse to make territorial demands of a Kurdish state
Summary
Web 2.0 facilitates the articulation of transcultural solidarities between Armenian, Assyrian, Greek and Kurdish social media users. Identifying the appropriate emotions that should accompany an apology is perhaps hazy in digital apologies, but certainly Kurdish apologisers sometimes make special effort to explain how knowledge of their ancestors’ complicity makes them feel – expressing shock, disgust and even hatred for the perpetrators – and to offer expressions of categorical regret – that is, the recognition that one’s ancestors’ actions constitute a moral failure, the wish that they could be undone, and a commitment to avoid similar actions in the future (Smith, 2008: 68).
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