Author Elyse Semerdjian speaks on her most recent book, Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (2023). During World War I, the Ottoman government deported, murdered, and culturally assimilated women and children from the indigenous Armenian community of Asia Minor. The Armenian Genocide, as with all genocides was informed by a deep understanding of gender and
patriarchy. Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide are the blue tribal tattoos that covered face and bodies of Armenian women assimilated into rural Muslim households. Western humanitarians sought to
rescue Armenian women and children but objectified the tribal tattoos they bore as signs
of racial corruption, colonial attitudes they brought with them from the colonization of
America. Semerdjian will trouble these colonial
assumptions about tattoos and share how new historical approaches, informed by indigenous studies, have documented the cross-pollination of genocidal methods from the Americas to the Ottoman Empire. Among these new findings is how the Indian boarding school model was adopted by the Ottomans.