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Podcast: New Books in Women's History
Episode: Elyse Semerdjian, "Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Description: Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or, alternatively, a national stain, and the bodies of women and children figured centrally within the Armenian communal memory and humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford UP, 2023), these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and-in what remains of tho...