Please join the WGSI in congratulating Dr. Hazal Halavut, who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation – “Archives of Absence: Nation’s Sleep, Perpetrator’s Dream, and Afterlives of Genocide.”
Hazal’s committee consisted of Dina Georgis (supervisor), Shahrzad Mojab (co-supervisor) and Rebecca Comay (Dept. of Philosophy)
Internal Examiner: Tracey Lemos, Professor, WGSI, CDTS, University of Toronto
External Examiner: Cemal Kafadar, Professor, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University
Abstract
What remains of loss when it is politically denied, historically erased, and collectively repressed? This dissertation examines genocide’s afterlives in the perpetrator’s archives of absence, arguing that loss is not simply disavowed but systematically structured into national coherence. In Turkey, the Armenian Genocide does not merely remain unacknowledged—it is absorbed and redistributed across historiography, political prohibitions, and cultural imaginaries, ensuring its erasure remains structurally operative. This absence does not erase; it organizes. It produces new affective economies, circulates through law and aesthetics, and dictates the very conditions of what can be remembered, what must be suppressed, and what is structurally ungrievable.
If the nation-state is sustained not only by what it remembers but by how it manages what it cannot, then Turkey’s archives of absence function as a technology of wakefulness—demanding permanent vigilance, casting the nation’s past as a sleep never to be returned to, where buried crimes and vulnerabilities remain sealed off yet ever-present. Yet without sleep, there is no dreaming; without dreaming, the unconscious remains inaccessible, and repression cannot be worked through. Hence, in the national imaginary, the imperative to stay awake, the fantasy of vigilance, and the binary of sleep as threat morph into obsession and anxiety, evoking a paranoid-schizoid condition.
I trace the recursive work of absence in Turkey through four frameworks of erasure—the nation’s sleep, dream, landscape, and the cut—as terrains of the national imaginary, each shaping how the Armenian Genocide is absorbed, displaced, and sustained. More than metaphors, these are affective and epistemic structures that organize knowledge, regulate repression, and shape national attachments to both past and present. Sleep is a terrain of unknowing, where the unresolved history of Armenians is concealed within another unresolved history—that of the Empire—both unprocessed, both lost objects, with the first sustained within the latter: the annihilation of Armenians foreclosed in the Turks’ fear of destruction, perpetration absorbed into
the narrative of victimhood. Dream exposes the nation’s desires, where foundational myths are sustained through anesthetic aesthetics—a sensory conditioning, an affective management that ensures what cannot be acknowledged is recast into sovereign fantasies of survival and greatness.
Landscape traces how absence is inscribed onto land, erasing Armenian memory while charging Anatolia, the motherland, with an uncanny presence. Here, erased histories become new territorial claims, new aesthetic forms, and new spatial investments that overwrite what came before. The cut—what returns—engages the colonial, psychic, and gendered economy of violence, where disavowed violence re-emerges, binding itself to new objects. The cutting of breasts, a signature act of genocide, finds new targets of severing: the Kurds.
This project is interdisciplinary and intertextual, drawing from psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, feminist historiography, affect theory, and archival studies, while engaging a diverse range of texts—from autopsy reports and historical memoirs to literature, songs, monuments, and state archives. Moving beyond frameworks of denial and trauma, this study theorizes archives of absence as a generative structure—not merely suppressing history but actively managing its erasures. Absence is not a void but a system that reproduces unknowing as a foundational condition of national life, structuring the limits of memory, history, and relationality. By reframing the archive not as a repository but as an infrastructure of disappearance, this study reorients genocide’s afterlives—not as haunting remnants, but as forces structuring the epistemic, affective, and political coordinates of the present.
Congratulations, Dr. Halavut!