Remembering the Armenian Genocide in Diaspora: Reconsidering the Role of New Media

This presentation will explore how Armenian youth use new digital media technologies to remember the Armenian Genocide a hundred or more years after it happened. At the core of my project are the “100 Voices: Survival, Justice, Memory,” a multi-media project carried out by a group of Armenian youth in Toronto in 2015 to commemorate the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. As I hold, 100 Voices is a digital archive of post-memory. The production team recorded and circulated individual post-memory narratives in the form of audio-visual testimony as it is often used in human rights activism. In this sense, 100 Voices functions as a counter-archive that challenges Turkey’s ongoing denial of the genocide.

In opening up a space for these young individuals to speak up against genocide denial, the 100 Voices project allowed for the formation of a distinct generational identity. The project’s participants often articulated this distinct subject position through a sense of duty or responsibility not only to remember the genocide and transmit its memories to future generations, but also to work towards genocide recognition and reparations. Notably, this duty of memory shapes Armenian youth’s relationship with the preceding generations, particularly that of survivors and victims, as well as the members of their own cohort. They see themselves as the youth the Armenian nation, who share a common past, work towards the same ‘cause,’ and dream of a future of restored justice.