Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey

Commemoration is considered essential to any project of confronting a nation’s violent past. Opinions on commemoration tend to focus on representation and reception: how the commemoration narrates the violence and how the public responds to it. However, this focus ignores the reality of violence’s continuing presence, including in the very public spaces of commemoration. The urgency of rethinking this focus has been nowhere more salient than in the case of contemporary Turkey, whose image on the world stage has rapidly descended from a regional beacon of democratization and prosperity to a hotbed of conflict and oppression within the space of a few recent years.

In Victims of Commemoration, Cayli explores both activist and official commemorations at sites of state-endorsed violence in Turkey. Cayli unpacks the reverberations of these commemorative acts and artifacts across the everyday life of the city where each site is located. The first comprehensive account of space’s centrality to confronting state-endorsed violence, this volume draws upon ethnographic research gathered throughout the first half of the 2010s, the period of Turkey’s quickly deteriorating global image. Victims of Commemoration challenges our tendency to understand the cultural practice of commemoration as distinct from violence, revealing the ways in which these memorial sites often exist alongside and at times exacerbate the violence itself.