FROM GENOCIDE TO POSTGENOCIDE: SURVIVAL, GENDER, AND POLITICS

On 31 July 2018, eighteen representatives of religious minority groups in Turkey, including the Armenians, Greeks, and Syriacs, issued a joint declaration saying: “As religious representatives and directors of different faiths and beliefs who have been residing in our country for centuries, we live out our faiths freely and practice our worship freely according to our traditions.” This state-orchestrated declaration contradicts a long history of discrimination suffered by minorities under different late Ottoman and Turkish political regimes. In the last two decades of the Ottoman Empire's rule, Ottoman Armenian, Greek, and Syriac subjects/citizens, among others, suffered extreme depredations and persecutions culminating in ethnic cleansing, genocide, and population exchange. The books under review deal with a grim phase in Ottoman and Turkish history: the Armenian Genocide during World War I and its repercussions during the subsequent republican period.