Memory books: mapping histories of ethnic coexistence

Clarke, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8509-3194 and Parish, Nina 2025. Memory books: mapping histories of ethnic coexistence. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This article examines Armenian artistic and cultural practitioners’ uses of memory-mapping to create representational spaces in book form that challenge hegemonic national representations of territories with multiple, conflicted histories. Such mappings often draw on cartographic documents, but the projects discussed here reflect a broader definition of mapping as process. Nelli Shishmanyan’s project Before the Crossfire. After the Wall (2020) provides a photographic record of everyday life in: (1) Armenian villages whose Azerbaijani populations have left since 1991 and tensions over Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh); and (2) Georgian villages where both ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis still co-exist. The NGO Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory’s project Firdus: Memory of a Place collects family stories, photographs and documents from the multicultural residents of a central Yerevan street of around 80 houses. These projects employ artistic and cultural mapping practices in book form to recover memories of ethnic coexistence in Armenia; community memories that have been marginalised in the wake of three decades of conflict. The multimedial approaches to memory-mapping (oral histories, maps, social media, archival and original photographs) adopted by these texts, offer a set of tools for the mapping of community memory. However we argue that these tools could also be used to document the historical conditions that precipitated the collapse of coexistence. To this end, we analyse NGO Hazarashen’s 2019 project, Fragments of Armenia’s Soviet Past: Tracing Armenian-Azerbaijani Coexistence to understand better how memory-mapping in book form can engage with political processes that facilitate the breakdown of coexistence.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Modern Languages
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > NE Print media P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism T Technology > TR Photography
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
ISSN:	1044-2057
Funders:	European Union
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	6 February 2025
Date of Acceptance:	28 January 2025
Last Modified:	06 Feb 2025 11:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175692

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